LA's outages are widely scattered, and are being blamed on high winds.[1] Crews are fixing distribution lines and transformers. Probably unrelated.<p>The NYC subway outages may have originated at two locations. The MTA says they lost signal power at 42nd/Grand Central, and utility power from Con Ed at 7th Avenue. Trains can run through the 7th Avenue station but the station is out of action. (The NYC subway system has three separate power systems - traction, signal, and utility.) No info on cause yet, but the problems are mostly fixed or bypassed now.<p>SF's outage is still vague, but is being blamed on a fire at the big substation on Larkin. SFFD says they've been using large amounts of CO2 to put out smoldering insulation. SFFD also says they're caught up after getting 20 people out of stuck elevators. PG&E isn't saying much.[2] They list "cause" as "unknown". They probably can't even get into the Larkin substation yet.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/outage-center/check-outage-status" rel="nofollow">https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/outage-center/check-outa...</a>
[2] <a href="https://m.pge.com/#outages" rel="nofollow">https://m.pge.com/#outages</a>
Hmmmm...I'm trying to verify the outage in LA. The tweet about the power outage at LAX is from today, but the other tweet in the example is from 2/22/17. No articles about a power outage in LA are popping up on google. Something about this article feels a bit click-baity.
It could be worse, from the Wikipedia page of notable power outages (yes there is such a page):<p>"On 7 June (2016), about 100% of Kenya went without power for over 4 hours. The nationwide blackout was caused after a rogue monkey got into a power station and triggered a nationwide blackout. However, it is notable that only about 1 million citizens were affected by the outage as the World Bank estimates that only 23% of the country's population have access to electricity."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages</a><p>I am not seeing any of these power outages being due to crazy al-qaeda terrorists or any of the other bad guys our government clowns get excitable about. It's the rogue monkeys and Enrons I fear.
Search "power outages" in Google news and scroll through a few days worth. They happen all the time, everywhere. I would be very surprised if there's any correlation across events here.
The outage in SF shutdown the company I work at for most of the day. I work remote so was unaffected but everyone else ended up being unable to work.<p>This was an outage of one substation for less than 12 hours. Now imagine an 8.0+ earthquake anywhere in the bay area. The whole city could be shutdown for prolonged periods.<p>You don't put all your servers in one datacenter so why would you put all of your employees in one building? I am not sure why companies don't encourage at least 50% of their employees to be remote. Seems like basic DR planning to me.
The seeming reluctance to spend lots of money on infrastructure maintenance and modernization really worries me, especially when I read these kinds of stories.
I lived in NYC during the 2001 blackout. It was the first power outage since 1977. The lights don't go out in NYC...it's a really big deal when they do.
I was once informed by someone working at a major energy company that if the utility frequency dropped to a certain specific value it could cause uncontrollable systemwide cascading blackouts. I don't remember the value, but I wish I did.<p>A large outage like SF, if it wasn't done in a controlled manner, could be grid overload. Or to prevent grid overload, utilities might need to shut down a regular on a high voltage supply line, which causes an overload somewhere else in the system, and automatic cutoff switches force a blackout.<p>Similar events have happened over the years starting in a remote state and ending in a California blackout. Often it's due to aging infrastructure which goes down unexpectedly, which then causes a chain reaction that hits other parts of the grid. If winds took down power lines in LA, this could cause a backup which could take out SF. It's possible that either LA or New York could have caused the SF blackout, or vice versa. If one part of the grid starts to go down it puts pressure on the rest, and things start to pop.<p>Note: I'm talking out my ass here, but it's based on news reports of previous outages.
Could be another warning shot from someone -
2013 silicon valley substation sniper attack <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid/" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid...</a>
Hasn't there been increased electromagnetic activity on the surface of the sun throughout the week?<p><a href="http://www.solarham.net/older.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.solarham.net/older.htm</a><p>Is the interference causing unexpected surges in old, unshielded equipment and infrastructure?
Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
I have a friend with a very important deliverable due today and he was not ready. I'm not saying he's responsible, but in the realm of things that make you go hmm...
Interestingly, in India this would have close to zero impact. Because of the rate of industrial growth combined with a massive shortfall of energy - almost everyone in urban India has private diesel-fueled electrical generators (yes - including individual homes and small startups).<p>Plus as a cultural thing, Indians have designed power failure into their daily lives. Interestingly trivia - the most popular Nokia phone in India was the one that had a dedicated torch.