A massive electrical failure has left all of Argentina and Uruguay without power, according to a major Argentine electricity provider.
Reports said the power cut had also affected parts of Brazil and Paraguay.
Argentine media said the power cut occurred shortly after 07:00 (11:00 BST), causing trains to be halted and failures with traffic signalling.
It came as people in parts of Argentina were preparing to go to the polls for local elections.
"A massive failure in the electrical interconnection system left all of Argentina and Uruguay without power," electricity supplier company Edesur said in a tweet.
The country's energy secretary, Gustavo Lopetegui, said the causes for the system failure had not yet been determined. He said power was being restored to some parts of the country, but added that the process could take several hours.
They obviously weren't going to shut down the U.S. power grid in retaliation, but maybe it was a well-calculated display of the Russians' capabilities.
Or a false flag operation by U.S. secret service. Which shouldn't shock anybody either.
>>19493 I hate to be a conspiracy nut, but exactly the same thing occurred to me. Three countries entire grid systems, the same weekend the US claims to be all over Russia? There is no such thing as a coincidence.
The problem is that it's really not that difficult if you know what you are doing. Power plants and relay stations are all interconnected in such a way that if there is a serious fault in one, a few others can shut down automatically as well to prevent damage to the grid itself. So in the worst circumstances, it can set in motion a whole cascade of power outages. And a fault like that can very well be provoked by hijacking the control system at one power station and making it behave in a way that triggers safety shutdowns in others. You can cripple entire countries and global regions that way.
Also, the SCADA systems used for industrial automation have essentially no security. They're supposed to be on a private network with no connection to the outside world, but in reality that's rarely the case; something as trivial as a laser printer with Wifi can provide a hacker with a route into that private network, at which point it's game over.
Frankly, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.
Well normally you don't hear about it because of cold and hot redundancy. "Hot" redundancy means that several power stations run parallel and one can take most of the power load of the other if it shuts down without most people noticing. "Cold" redundancy means that other power stations or reactors can be switched onto the grid momentarily if there is a fault or failure at another point of the grid. So ideally, there is never really a power outage as such, or at least you don't notice it during the few milliseconds that your light bulb at home doesn't have power.
Safety shutdowns are a different problem. Parts of the grid can shut down if a catastrophic fault in one element of the grid is detected that makes it necessary that other parts of it shut down as well to prevent damage. It's one angle of attack to shut down an entire power grid that way. Or alternatively, you can take control of all power stations and shut them down in a controlled fashion. The latter should be a bit more difficult though, because there's naturally a difference between hacking one power station and hacking all of them.
Not really, no. There are a couple of half-interesting research projects, but development of new power plants is stalled because of Brexit - the whole nuclear sector is fucked if we drop out of Euratom.
>>19500 But that's not going to happen because we're going to get a great deal because we're going to make the European Commission give us one, even though their negotiation team has been officially disbanded, and the Commission will be dissolved until November so there'll be nobody to negotiate with, but we're British so we can do this and anyone that says we can't is an unpatriotic traitor who's just talking the country down.
