Been thinking about this for a while actually. There was that blackout in Bristol last March, and then three days later came the announcement about the new surveillance legislation. Might be nothing. Might not be.
The pattern I keep coming back to is whether its about distraction or something more operational - like, are they testing infrastructure response times before rolling something out? Because if you wanted to gauge public reaction capacity, knocking out a grid section would tell you a lot about how quickly people organise and communicate without digital infrastructure.
Anyone else been logging these incidents with timestamps? I've started doing it properly after noticing the same thing twice in Somerset over the past year. Would be worth building an actual database rather than just anecdotes. Does anyone know if there's already a resource tracking UK grid failures against news cycles, or are we basically starting from scratch here?