I woke up on the day our November print edition was going to press to an alert on my phone that the 911 system was down in Palm Springs for T-Mobile users.
Then I checked my email, where I had a message from the city of Indio saying their 911 system is completely down. Meanwhile, I just got a public safety alert saying that “911 may be down in Riverside County.” (May?)
So, yeah, local 911 systems were having problems that day. Oh, and so was the system the Independent uses to send newsletters. It was in the midst of a “global outage.” The Independent’s website itself—along with the websites of all 300-plus news publications on the platform we use—was down for a while the day before.
Today, the 911 systems and our newsletter platform are working again. I mention them, however, because they’re a bright-red, blinking, blaring warning signal that all of us need to be prepared for more outages and hacks and digital shenanigans in the coming weeks and months.
Our world today is extremely interconnected—and we’re in the midst with a high-stakes game of AI whack-a-mole.
Some of these aforementioned outages may or may not have to do with the big PHP news. As The New York Times reported on Oct. 22:
Users around the world were met with error messages when they tried to use websites on Thursday as governments, broadcasters and companies scrambled to patch a critical flaw that exposed their sites to hackers.
Many websites were taken down as an emergency precaution after security researchers found major flaws in PHP, a widely used programming language. While recent data suggests that its use is waning, about 70 percent of all websites and web applications use PHP, according to some estimates.
Governments, including those of Germany and Kenya, moved quickly to secure official websites. Some websites were back up on Thursday, but others remained offline.
In the Netherlands, the portal that gives citizens access to government services was down Wednesday and into Thursday, as were a crime tip website and the country’s digital ID site, according to Dutch media reports. The Netherlands Cybersecurity Center issued instructions on how to add security updates, even as its own site was unavailable. …
Security researchers using OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence models found the vulnerability, which could allow hackers to take control of servers, steal private data and deface websites, experts said.
Hooray to AI for discovering the vulnerability! Unfortunately, the bad guys have access to AI, too!
There is a lesson to be learned here from all of these hacks and vulnerabilities, exemplified wonderfully by refrigerators at French supermarkets.
Yes: Refrigerators at French supermarkets. As BBC News reported on Oct. 12:
Hundreds of French supermarkets have been hit by a cyber attack that caused their fridges and freezers to heat up, spoiling fresh and frozen food estimated to be worth millions of euros.
Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected. … The software allows retailers to manage their cold units remotely.
Yuck. What a nightmare.
As for that aforementioned lesson … later in the BBC News piece, there’s this:
The affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified. The (technology) firm added in a statement that it had “long advised” businesses to keep supported systems up to date.
Make sure all of your technology is kept as up to date as possible. Protect your passwords, and change them when necessary. Create redundancies and backups. Take all the precautions you possibly can against those aforementioned bad guys.
Learn from the French supermarket refrigerators, folks.
Note: This is a slightly edited version of the editor’s note that appeared in the November 2026 print edition. Portions of this were originally published online in the Oct. 12 and Oct. 22 editions of the Indy Digest.
