Been following this one closely since it happened. The timing is what gets me - three separate substations going down within a 40-minute window isn't typical cascade failure behaviour. I've seen genuine cascade failures documented, and they tend to snowball fast, not stagger like that.
What's particularly curious is the overlap with those unusual radar returns that were logged the same evening. A contact of mine who monitors aviation feeds noticed some anomalous tracks over the affected region roughly two hours prior. Probably coincidence. Probably.
I've been cross-referencing the outage timestamps against a few other datasets - solar activity was actually quite low that day, so the usual geomagnetic excuse doesn't really hold water here.
A few things worth considering:
SCADA vulnerabilities have been publicly acknowledged for years - a targeted disruption wouldn't necessarily leave obvious fingerprints, The affected corridor has some interesting infrastructure if you look at what's actually housed along that grid segment, Official explanation changed twice in 48 hours, which is always worth noting
I'm not saying it's anything exotic yet. Could be mundane equipment failure or even a test of some kind. But the staggered timing genuinely doesn't fit the standard models.
Has anyone managed to pull the actual NERC incident filings? They should be publicly accessible. Would love a second pair of eyes on the raw data before drawing any conclusions.
What did others make of it?
