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November 6, 2017
Massive Internet/Communication Outages During Last Day Of DOD Grid Down And 'Communications Interoperability' Training Drill - Coincidence Or Beta Test?
(Mass communicatiion outages across the U.S. on November 6, 2017)
As Stefan Stanford reported on October 26, 2017, the DOD has been conducting a training exercise that began on November 4th and continued until Tuesday, November 6, 2017, which focused on a grid down scenario which included a “communications interoperability” training exercise, and "coincidentally" America has just suffered massive internet and communication outages from coast to coast, as shown via a location screen shot of the severe outages above.
Elements of the US Department of Defense (DOD) will conduct a “communications interoperability” training exercise November 4-6, once again simulating a “very bad day” scenario. Amateur Radio and MARS organizations will take part.
“This exercise will begin with a notional massive coronal mass ejection event which will impact the national power grid as well as all forms of traditional communication, including landline telephone, cellphone, satellite, and Internet connectivity,” Army MARS Program Manager Paul English, WD8DBY, explained in an announcement.
COAST TO COAST COMMUNICATION OUTAGES
While many are reporting this recent coast to coast outages as "Internet outages," it is noteworthy that many of the communications companies such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon include significant percentages of people that not only lost their internet, but their phone services as well. The overall outages affected other internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Verizon, Spectrum and more.
Websites such as Drudge Report, Infowars, Fox News and others could not be accessed by some users at the same time that those same users could access other sites, indicating specific servers carrying those sites were affected without affecting others.
For example, we use Comcast and are on the east coast, so one would think since we were in the midst of the outage area, all our browsing would be affected, yet while we could could not load Drudge Report, Infowars, Fox News, and even the Down Detector site itself for over an hour, other sites such as Steve Quayle.com, SHTFPlan, ANP and others loaded just fine.
The spikes in outage reports shown in a Down Detector screen shot below, indicate the majority of the outages occurred at the same time:
Verizon reports that the majority of their outages were "mobile phone" with 47 percent of the reports listing that as their outage, and 34 percent reporting "mobile internet," and 23 percent reporting "landline internet," for November 6, 2017.
Comcast reports show 66 percent suffered internet outages, while 17 percent listed "total blackout," and 15 percent lost television service.
AT&T had 61 percent listing internet outages and only 17 percent reported "phone" outages with 17 percent saying they had "no network or reception."
Microsoft Azure's percentages and listed reports show why some sites were up and others were down for some users as 39 percent of the reports said "cloud services" were down and 39 percent listed the issue as "website hosting," and 21 percent of the reports said "virtual machines" suffered outages.
A list of services recieving reports can be seen on the main page of Down Detector.
The website isitdownrightnow provides a live internet map showing an "unusually large number" of websites and users have been affected and that the "root cause of this outage is still unknown."
COINCIDENCE OR BETA TEST?
While the fears before the DOD drill of whether the nation would suffer power outages between November 4 and November 6, weren't realized, the fact that part of the grid down drill did include as aspect termed "communications interoperability," which specifically highlighted "forms of traditional communication, including landline telephone, cellphone, satellite, and Internet connectivity," all of which occurred on the last day of the DOD drill, just begs the question of whether this was part of their "training" and drill and if it was down purposely as part of a test?
That question is not just based on the coincidental timing of the outages and DOD drill, but a look at Norse Live attack map, shows that while some attacks are external, a significant and worriesome amount are coming from within the U.S. and hitting other portions of the U.S., specifically from Washington and California, hitting the North East, and volleys back from the North East into Washington and California, the two sections of country the hardest hit.
Another point of interest found on the Norse live attack map page, is they have a section towards the bottom listing things like attacker, target, attack type, etc.... and while watching we see many of the internet attacks hitting the Washington and Redmond areas have the "attacker" listed as the Microsoft Corporation."
BOTTOM LINE
If this was some sort of Beta testing of a kill switch, or a simulation on knocking out communications, it would have been a failure because while the outages were widespread, going from coast to coast, and did include multiple forms of communications, the majority of people could still access the internet, even if certain sites were unavailable for those users.
