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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

I think we saw a lot of news that "this is going to be a black start" and so on. Yet they were operating quite normally already the same night (direct personal communication with people there). I think HN in general didn't provide a reliable picture of what was going to happen at all. Same with my Twitter feed.

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Disagree strongly. They did a black start:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43820964

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824032

At least HN did better than the BBC that started by reporting and I quote "It is thought to be caused by a Cyberattack".

Also should be noted the Guardian is not doing better as the article does not clarify what the cause was. Most likely explanation at the moment is this:

"What is "Induced Atmospheric Vibration"?" - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/848666/what-is-i...

"Diagnosis and Mitigation of Observed Oscillations in IBR-Dominant Power Systems - A PRACTICAL GUIDE" - https://www.esig.energy/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/esig-rpt-...

It's nice to think about what is involved in a "black start", but as people working with power grids are engineers too and these scenarios are things they will often consider and train for, it wasn't that big a deal.

I suspect it's a bit of insecurity; what would you do if your application's landscape suddenly went offline? In theory it's all infrastructure-as-code and pressing 'start' will boot everything up, pull up the last backups, etc... but when's the last time you tested that? When's the last time you did a training?

I've been working at an energy company for a few years now; while we have an office fire drill a few times a year, there is never an IT outage training. At best a load test late at night. And they paid the price a few years ago; due to the energy crisis, people checked their energy contracts and prices more often, causing 2-5x more load than normal. And the IT hadn't been updated, even though they were warned for a decade that their IT had bottlenecks (single database etc) and they would run into issues sometime.

I agree and I still see people speculating over the cause of the outage in this very thread, showing a worrying degree of confidence that for example renewable energies played a negative role

In a more upbeat note, the people I talked to in person were really cool-headed and realistic regarding speculation about the cause, compared to how lots of people seemed to have reacted on the web. Most people were basically "Someone incompetent fucked up, it'll be back soon" in mood during yesterday.

There’s a subset of the population that has a survivalist fetish and wants to see worst-case scenarios in infrastructure, including black starts, play out in real life.

I think it’s because they get to witness uncommon procedures play out.

The rest of the population just wants to get on with life.

Sir it was as black of a start as you could wish for. The France and Morocco interconnects helped only a slight bit. The grid went to 0 (zero) generation according to the grid operator; 10GW number was a data issue (!)

> I think we saw a lot of news that "this is going to be a black start" and so on.

Well, it basically was, wasn't it, just a fairly orderly one?

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