So this morning you probably used your iPhone's alarm to wake up, scrolled through your Instagram feed, and turned on your TV to this morning's news. What if this all wasn't possible tomorrow? Did you ever stop to take a moment to realize just how reliant our world is on technology?
What would happen if our World Wide Web completely disappeared? What if our signals were hacked, our lives placed on dispay? Not able to access huge forms of transportation, like airplanes? I regrettably inform you that the day technology crashes might be upon us. Did you notice the strange sequence of events that happened today?
7:00-9:00am: This morning unsuspecting Subway passengers were stalled on the tracks for hours at a time, in silence, without any word from the outside world. The system as they knew it was down, and they were stranded.
Around 9:00am: United Airlines experienced a computer glitch that resulted in the grounding of flights across the nation.
(yimg.com)
11:32am: New York Stock Exchange abruptly haulted trading as a result of an internal tech blackout. Sketchy much?
(reutersmedia.net)
11:50am: The Wall Street Journal website inexplicably crashed this morning. Although this only lasted about 2 hours, it created quite a buzz among those attempting to access the site.
(politico.com)
12:30pm: "FBI Director James Comey states the Islamic State terrorist network is using Twitter and encryption to recruit thousands of English-language followers and send out kill orders" according to Dustin Volz, National Journal reporter. What does this mean? It means that even with the most elite troupe of computer science experts and cryptographers, we cannot create a system that has enough manpower to crack the encryptions programmed by ISIS.
(www.slate.com)
1:00pm: Over 2,500 people in DC mysteriously lost power.
Additional events of 7/8/15: In a study released today by New York Daily News, the technology danger that we face has a price tag: The site states that "the report outlines a scenario of an electricity blackout that leaves 93 million people in New York City and Washington DC without power." Although they claim this is unlikely, they also make sure to outline the potential financial risk that could total to "$243 billion and could rise to reach $1 trillion." This could be devastating for our nation.
I'm not saying that I'm a crazy conspiracy theorist or anything of the sort, but this is a little scary.. don't you think? The very thing that keeps us alive could end up collapsing the world as we know it. No transportation, no food, no power. No productivity. Would we even survive?
Although I have yet to formulate a concrete conspiracy theory surrounding this sequence of events, it has definitely been a strange day thus far. To think that all of these events have already happened today makes you question the possibility of a worldwide technology crash.
I'm not saying there's need to panic, but the events that took place this morning have yet to sit well with me.
