[api]

It's a valid hypothesis and not crazy at all. If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant.

It might not be covert economic warfare, but more of a covert demonstration whose audience is intended to be the US government. "We have lots of dangerous 0-days, and there's a lot more where these came from." In that case public credit would never be claimed.

It reminds me of how GitHub kept getting DDOSed for no reason. Turns out GitHub was a popular demo target for vendors of DDOS botnets to show their power.

Edit: could be exactly that... a demo of wares by a black market vendor of 0-days for a potential buyer.

Edit #1: a non-malicious explanation might be a vendor pushing out a bad software update to something.

[tlrobinson]

"If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant."

I would be very surprised if there weren't at least 3 power outages in random cities on a daily basis, you just don't hear about it until it's 3 major cities.

[lloeki]

> I would be very surprised if there weren't at least 3 power outages in random cities on a daily basis, you just don't hear about it until it's 3 major cities

I wouldn't even be surprised if it regularly were 3 major cities at about the same time and it's just that statistically someone had to end up taking notice and trying to make sense out of it when it's actually a somehow random† distribution of events, the latest of which happening to be clustered.

But digital warfare seems to somehow look more exciting to many, probably because it's intuitively less frightening than waving nukes at each other's nose, while it may very well impact people's lives for the worst in a very large, non-obvious and pernicious way.

† Some events may be random but aren't independent across because of interconnections and dispatching woes[0]. Managing a power grid or three is a fascinating thing in itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

[mr_tophat]

This is along the lines of my thinking... I think before jumping to conclusions, it would be worth digging up some semi-current data on frequencies of outages. Not sure how conveniently/centrally that data is available, however.

[api]

That is also possible. I can't find any comprehensive history of blackouts anywhere so it's hard to check probabilities.

[tyingq]

There's this: http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/data-explore-15-years-of-...

Which includes a link to this Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AdxhulfM9jeqviIZihuO...

[api]

Great find.

At a glance it looks like 1-2 dozen per month, so a coincidence is definitely plausible.

Have to wait and see.

[tyingq]

You could argue that none of the ones today are weather related. If you remove the weather related outages, it's easier to support the notion of a conspiracy. I don't personally think this is one, but...

[Johnny555]

not the three most economically significant

I don't think SF ranks in the top 3, I'm almost certain that Chicago would rank higher in economic significance, and I'd guess that Houston is above SF, probably Boston too.

Despite SF being so popular in the technology space, it's really quite a small city -- only around 800K people, compared to nearly 4M in LA, and 2.5M in Chicago.

EDIT: I found a ranking from 2010 and SF is #9

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/america...

New York LA Chicago Wash DC Houston Dallas Philadelphia Boston SF

[acchow]

Could be a digital weapons test.