[ WP ] The July 8 2015 outages at United Airlines and New York Stock Exchange turn out to be the beginning of a cyberattack

Dear Diary, 
 
 At least this does n't run on technology. Wednesday was crazy. 
 
 I was getting ready for the morning status update meeting when Ellie called me to tell me that her flight was delayed. United's website did n't mention anything at all and showed it as on time but she said that things were a mess at the terminal. Huh. 
 
 During an early lunch I noticed that Fox News TV I usually ignore mentioning stock trading shutting down in New York. The line at the counter was n't moving at all. The cashier was swiping a lady's card again and again and had switched to a second card. Finally one of her friends spotted her some cash. The same credit card failure happened to the next person in line. When I returned to work other people mentioned the same problem. An online purchase hung after I clicked submit order. It was n't until an hour later that Visa announced `` temporary network problems'' on their Twitter. Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson issued a statement that the technical glitches that transpired today are not due to hacking. 
 
 That afternoon, people in many other cities reported that they could n't VPN in or load any websites. Nor could phones connect to the Internet. About an hour later even CNN picked up on widespread Internet outages on the west coast. Just before 4 p.m. there were very brief reports of an explosion in Los Angeles although it was just CNN reading off some tweets. Normal TV broadcasts were cut off by an awful shrieking noise courtesy of the Emergency Alert System. Every single channel was blanked out and just read a message that said `` Evacuate downtown areas now.'' 
 
 Cellphones became useless as at first one would receive an `` all circuits are busy'' or `` switch error 12'' message. Subsequent attempts to place a call just got dead air. We decided to call it a day. The roads quickly became useless as a huge traffic jam formed. 
 
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