An old English proverb anchored in superstition from ancient Greek and Roman beliefs is that bad luck always comes in threes, but that does not mean bad luck was always random. The United States has now experienced two debilitating, unprecedented blackouts across critical infrastructure in two da ys. The timing is almost too coincidental to be a coincidence – coming on the heels of the removal of Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO amidst an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, widespread recriminations about chip exports to China, and demands for tighter export controls and more hawkish policies against China. Could China and other hostile foreign actors be targeting U.S. infrastructure? It’s too early to know for sure, but the country deserves far more transparent answers than we have received so far. An extraordinary timeline, too coincidental to be a coincidence? At 3:54 p.m. ET on Friday, November 13, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in America, “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” It was only the third nationwide ground stop ever ordered. The first came on Sept. 11, 2001; the second more than 20 years later, on Jan. 11, 2023. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would say only that “a communication issue” had struck every one of the 22 centers that guide planes across the country, and that technicians were investigating. A subsequent press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did little to reassure anyone, with no answers about what happened and little reassurance that it would be fixable anytime soon, with airports sending travelers home and communicating that flight cancellations would persist for many hours at a minimum, if not days. It was the second time in two days that critical infrastructure the country cannot function without simply stopped, potentially for very nefarious reasons. The day before, Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot went dark in 74 countries and stayed down for hours. Both blackouts struck within a day-and-a-half of the most damaging China espionage story in years. Two blackouts, measured in billions in lost economic activity and inconvenience The last nationwide ground stop, in 2023, lasted about 90 minutes and still delayed more than 10,000 flights and canceled 1,300. Friday’s lasted hours with no resolution imminent on the horizon. At the four-hour point of this latest ground stop, 10,243 flights were already delayed and 3,234 cancelled, with flights grounded not only at single regional airports but across the entire nation, suggesting systemic breakdowns rather than localized issues. Microsoft’s failure began at 11:17 a.m. ET on Thursday and spread across 19 Microsoft 365 services. Within an hour, complaints about Outlook were running at more than 2,000 times their normal level. Microsoft counts more than 450 million paid commercial seats, with many millions of those users locked out entirely from their inboxes and other critical services. The casualty list reads like a roll call of essential services: the U.S. House of Representatives was substantively incapacitated; a federal appeals court that could not send or receive email; Britain’s Parliament and its National Health Service, where the failure threatened patients’ prescriptions; Australia’s spy agency and federal police were sent offline as well. When a botched CrowdStrike update crashed 8.5 million machines in 2024, the Fortune 500 alone lost an estimated $5.4 billion. One risk adviser already puts Microsoft’s bill in the billions for Australia alone, not to mention the lost economic value in the U.S. or the rest of the world. This was the first time in history so many users were locked out for so long – with shifting and unsatisfactory explanations. Similarly, this is the first time in global aviation history where there has been a nationwide ground stop with no satisfactory, clear explanation and immediate fix. Reassurance first, explanation later does not work as a crisis playbook in these extraordinary circumstances Microsoft wrote the playbook for false comfort. For a full day it insisted there was “no indication” of malicious activity while its own bulletins showed it did not know what had broken. If it did not know for sure, then how could they know for sure there was no indication of anything malicious amidst shifting explanations? First it blamed elevated load, then servers that had unexpectedly dropped out. It found no recent change that lined up with the failure. Hours later, it was rolling back a network change that did. Early Friday, engineers were still trying to “pinpoint the underlying cause of the traffic influx.” Only on Friday afternoon did Microsoft name a culprit: a flaw introduced during a network capacity upgrade, “not related to cyber.” That sequence is as nonsensical as it is falsely reassuring. No patient would trust a doctor who swears it is not an infection before he can diagnose the fever. You cannot rule out what you cannot yet explain, and nobody can feel particularly reassured from this disturbing sequence of events and shifting explanations. Suspicious timing and a 15-year track record On Thursday morning, Nvidia, whose board failures we dissected in Fortune this week, announced the resignation of Jensen Huang, the chip industry’s loudest advocate for selling to China, after he admitted an affair with a businesswoman U.S. officials suspect of spying for Beijing. Beijing has been vocal in calling it a smear amidst a rapid escalation of U.S.-China tensions. Lawmakers in both parties are demanding testimony and tighter export controls. Within three hours, inboxes went dark from Capitol Hill to Canberra. A day later, planes stopped and were grounded. Could that really be a coincidence? Perhaps we are being too conspiratorial, but there is a certain uncanny resemblance to Beijing’s favorite playbook, which is to divert from negative news stories by shutting down internet services and diverting public attention. For example, in 2011, a petition to free Ai Weiwei got Change.org knocked offline. In 2012, exposés of the family fortunes of Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao got Bloomberg and The New York Times blocked in China and targeted by hackers. In 2014, as Hong Kong marched for democracy, a newspaper and a voting site were buried under one of the largest attacks the internet had ever seen. In 2015, China’s “Great Cannon” hammered GitHub for days for hosting banned news. In 2019, Telegram and the LIHKG forum were swamped as Hong Kong marched again. In 2022, news of the zero-COVID protests on Twitter drowned in a deluge of spam. Maybe this pattern of untimely hacks was merely a coincidence – or could it have been more than coincidence? Microsoft knows this adversary better than anyone. Hackers tied to Beijing tore through its customers’ Exchange servers in 2021 and stole some 60,000 State Department emails through its cloud in 2023, a breach a federal review board blamed on a “cascade of security failures” at Microsoft. Just three weeks ago, Microsoft itself said a China-aligned group had turned AI agents loose on more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 customers. Is it time to buy home batteries, water tanks, k-rations and porta potties? Whatever the cause, the lesson is identical. Some cyber experts are warning about potentially economically destabilizing cyberattacks, with researchers warning that AI-enabled hacking is spreading like a virus: attacks on previously unknown flaws have roughly doubled since capable open-source models arrived. U.S. agencies say China’s Volt Typhoon hackers have already burrowed into American communications, transportation, energy and water networks, in some cases for five years, positioning themselves to disrupt them. They sat inside one small Massachusetts electric and water utility for more than 300 days. If the inbox and the skies can go dark on consecutive days, why not the grid, or the tap? Is it time for every business and household to buy storage batteries, water tanks, MREs and porta potties? Of course, regardless of whether this was a Chinese or foreign malevolent actor attack, or whether it was merely the coincidental degradation of antiquated and outdated infrastructure systems, all of this takes place against the backdrop of the substantive hollowing out of U.S. government counterintelligence and cyber capabilities, with more than 1,500 special agents having departed the FBI and almost 1,000 staffers—about one-third of the workforce—have left the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) since Trump returned to office. Domestic commentators point out that this comes despite $1 trillion in Pentagon spending; and that the upgrades needed for aviation infrastructure would have cost $40 billion. Legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove’s renowned book was titled, “Only the paranoid survive”, suggesting paranoia is not entirely unwarranted. The poet Delmore Schwartz said in 1966 that “even paranoids have enemies.” And everyone from Joseph Heller to Henry Kissinger to Kurt Cobain has repeated some variation of “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Sometimes, superstition that seems delusional can connect authentic facts. And sometimes it behooves us to look at “worst case” scenarios in an effort to avoid them. The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com ...read more read less