Hacker News Reader

I'd only heard of it in the context of a solar flare blowing out all the transformers and we'd be SOL

It's been a huge problem in Ukraine. The Russians have been targeting the large ones, and it's been a large part of their blackouts. To the extent they protect key ones with patriot batteries. But apparently no one manufactures them anymore on the continent. Or like, they produce one or two a year. So the euros have had to gift their spare ones. It's quite an interesting story

Russian troops are not acts of God, but acts of war. I believe that GP is thinking of interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME), which is among the potentially disruptive forms of space weather: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_mass_ejection#Impact_o...

But sabotage by earthbound troops is of a different character. Disruption by space weather could happen in peacetime, or anywhere, and could disrupt many vulnerable devices simultaneously, or even be blamed on hackers or enemy action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com