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The past month has seemed like one battle after another, and it’s taking a toll on Americans who are starting to feel like everything is breaking at once.
October began ominously after the Pentagon launched an initiative on Sept. 30 called FORTRESS, which seeks to ensure that every major U.S. military base can run for 90 days without outside help if a war cuts off power and supply chains.
The plan envisions portable nuclear reactors, large-scale battery storage, and microgrids that can disconnect bases from civilian power networks. It also calls for strategic reserves of munitions, fuel, critical minerals, electronics, spare parts, and medical supplies.
Then came a month of cyberattacks that hit hundreds of companies and institutions around the world. Targets included the Federal Election Commission, Sony, John Deere, Oracle Health, Burger King Japan, and the State Bank of India. The hacking spree was so widespread that it was dubbed “Black October.”
Cyberattacks even reached freezers across Europe and at U.S. military bases, with temperatures hiked high enough to spoil frozen food. France blamed the freezer hacks on Iran, which had previously vowed to retaliate against the U.S. and its allies for the war against the regime.
Adding to the unease was the U.K. government’s campaign urging Britons to keep canned food, bottled water, and cash on hand to get through three days of disruption.
Cybersecurity experts also rushed to fix vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language that’s used in nearly 70% of all websites. The National Security Agency warned the vulnerability could allow attackers to take control of affected web servers. Black October reached a crescendo with the largest crypto heist in history: North Korean hackers swiped $6.3 billion from Binance.
Days later, U.S. voters delivered a stunning rebuke to President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans, as Democrats swept races across GOP strongholds in midterm elections. Several candidates who campaigned on pushing back against data centers rode to victory in the so-called blue tsunami, threatening the AI boom that has powered the U.S. economy and stock market in recent years.
While stocks jumped in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, they suddenly tumbled with top indexes suffering the worst losses since Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff shock in April 2025. Tech companies saw especially steep declines, and on Nov. 5 the Nasdaq 100 marked its worst single-day performance since March 2020—during the early panic over COVID-19.
Markets regained some ground as dip-buyers rushed in to snap up bargains. But then another bombshell came last weekend, when Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. After a separate affair with an Nvidia employee emerged days later, Huang stepped down as CEO from the AI chip giant he cofounded.
Nvidia stock plunged as markets anticipated tougher restrictions on its chip exports, while the sudden loss of Huang, who hadn’t designated a successor, put at risk all the “circular” financing deals he made with companies throughout the AI ecosystem.
In addition to the stock carnage, the spy scandal also highlighted China’s extensive industrial espionage efforts, which could tip the scales in the AI race that may determine economic and military supremacy.
Huang resigned as Nvidia CEO on Wednesday. Then on Thursday, Microsoft’s suite of software tools went offline, shutting down email and calendars as well as collaboration and AI functions. The company attributed the outage to a technical issue—and not to cyberattacks or AI.
“The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change,” it said.
Workers around the world felt paralyzed by the Microsoft outage, so many suspected it had a role in the FAA’s order to ground planes at all U.S. airports on Friday, forcing airlines to cancel or delay thousands of flights.
Microsoft said it had no indication that the ground stop was related to its global outage. The FAA later blamed its drastic move on an upgrade from copper wire to fiber-optic cables at a communications node in Arkansas.
The changeover caused routers across the air traffic control system to be flooded with more than 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds. Because it disrupted some radar feeds, the FAA ordered the ground stop to ensure safety. It was lifted about four hours later.
Still, when the problem first emerged on Friday, it was so alarming the White House situation room and national security apparatus went into action.
The FBI, the director of national intelligence, the Defense Department, the NSA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency all got on a call to compare notes. They didn’t see any chatter or “footprints” that are normally associated with a cyberattack, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. But on Sunday, he didn’t completely rule one out.
“We think it was the installation or the router that was the bad actor,” Duffy told Fox News Sunday. “But we’re open. If we see something else, we’re going to continue to investigate with our federal partners and law enforcement.”
The cumulative effect of all the disruptions has put Americans on edge. A cruise ship that overturned in New Orleans after getting hit by a tanker on Friday didn’t help either.
Chuck Amasio, a 68-year-old from Rahway, New Jersey, who was stuck at Newark Liberty International Airport, told the Associated Press “There’s a lot of weird stuff going on” and wondered if it was all part of some form of attack.
“We talk about how wars aren’t done with bombs anymore,” he added. “They shut down airspace or a power grid. They can cripple an economy.”
Maxine Gustafson, a 34-year-old physician assistant from Minneapolis, was at Chicago’s O’Hare airport when she admitted to the AP that the week’s mishaps made her feel afraid and helpless.
“It makes you think, like, is this a cyberattack?” she said. “We don’t have control over a lot of this stuff.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
