🚨 Banks, flights, food, fuel, power. All 5 are flashing red at the same time, and nothing is safe.
This is what Covid looked like in week 1. Scattered headlines. Shelves still full. Nobody called it a crisis.
1/ 🇫🇷 FOOD: Hackers set the fridges in up to 700 French supermarkets to defrost overnight. Vast stocks of food went in the trash. On Monday, France blamed Iran's Revolutionary Guards. A similar attack has since hit stores in 11 more European countries.
2/ 🇮🇷 FUEL: Iran's military says 4 oil tankers were hit by explosions in the Strait of Hormuz this week after they "ignored warnings". At least 10 ships were hit in the first 10 days of November, after 37 attacks in October.
3/ 🌍 BANKS: A Microsoft outage hit at least 74 countries for nearly 18 hours. Finance firms in Japan went back to fax machines. Banks in Australia warned of fake "Microsoft" fixers. This week the FBI warned that hackers use an AI tool that stole data on about 67,000 people from South Korean financial firms.
4/ 🇺🇸 FLIGHTS: Yesterday the FAA stopped flights at every US airport with more than 3,500 planes in the air. The longest shutdown since 9/11. Nearly 10,000 flights canceled. Investigators have not ruled out a cyberattack. Officials say it will happen again until the system is upgraded.
5/ 🇺🇸 POWER: Pentagon planning documents call for every major US base to run on its own power, water and fuel for at least 90 days. The general who led the Hurricane Katrina response now asks what the Pentagon knows that it isn't telling us. He says "American civilian leaders have been left out of the loop."
Now zoom out.
Old systems are buckling under the load. Overloaded routers grounded a whole country. Overwhelmed servers knocked out email in 74 countries. Hackers now go after supermarket fridges, not just banks. And the US is at war with Iran.
Covid emptied the shelves. Nobody is calling this a crisis yet. But US military bases already plan for the day the grid goes dark.
FEMA and the FCC test the national Emergency Alert System on TV and radio this Tuesday. The transportation secretary wants $50 billion to fix air traffic control.
My predictions, and they are extreme:
→ Another nationwide ground stop before New Year.
→ The fridge hack reaches a 13th country.
→ A major bank locks customers out of their money for days.
→ More tankers burn in Hormuz, and oil jumps overnight.
→ A Western government tells families to stock up for a blackout before Christmas.
The next system to fail is already out there. Follow me so you don't find out at the checkout.
