Is a global blackout coming on 17 November? What the data says

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Updated 10 November, 18:30 UTC

10 Nov 18:30 UTC One week before 17 November: what you will actually see that day (with local times), the real security news being mixed into the rumour, and what happened on 3–10 November.
4 Nov 22:15 UTC Rewritten around 17 November: the "COVID 2.0" claim (bank accounts at zero, the internet down for three months), where it comes from, Kazakhstan's reply, and a live status box. New in Russian, Spanish and Portuguese.
3 Nov 02:00 UTC Updated after 2 November: the agency's launch and the minister's statement, what happened on 1–3 November, the new 17 November rumour (The Simpsons and the US alert test) and the 13 November "doomsday" paper. Outage numbers refreshed.
31 Oct 13:30 UTC First version.

Posts are warning of a worldwide blackout on 17 November: the power out, the internet down for three months, bank accounts wiped to zero. Nothing points to any of it. What is actually planned that day is a one-minute test of the US emergency alert system on radio and TV. The post behind it has reportedly been seen more than four million times. An earlier version named 2 November, which passed without a blackout; X readers added a note to that one calling it baseless and linked to this map so people could check for themselves.

Live, checked every 5 minutes · 16:20 UTC

No global outage right now. The internet is working normally in 249 of 250 countries and territories we monitor. See the live map

17 November: what is claimed, and what is real

Since 1 November posts claim that The Simpsons "predicted" a "Great Blackout" on 17 November. The episode they point to, "It's a Blunderful Life", aired on 19 November 2023 and is about a fictional power cut in Springfield. The date is real for another reason: on 17 November at 14:20 Eastern Time (19:20 UTC) the US government runs a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System. The FCC announced it on 16 September. Radio and TV broadcasts in the US will be interrupted for about a minute by a test message that says no action is needed. It tests the warning system; it does not switch anything off. If the test has to move, the backup date is 3 December.

What you will see on 17 November

In the US, radio and TV programmes stop for about a minute for alert tones and the message "This is only a test. No action is required by the public.", in English, Spanish or both. FEMA's page about the test talks only about radio and TV. Nothing is switched off, and outside the US nothing happens at all.

The test starts at 14:20 in New York, which is 11:20 in Los Angeles, 16:20 in Brasília, 19:20 UTC and in London, 20:20 in Central Europe, 22:20 in Moscow, 00:20 on 18 November in Kazakhstan and 04:20 on 18 November in Japan.

The wildest version promises a "COVID 2.0": hackers wipe the big banks, thousands of accounts show "0", and the world's internet is switched off for three months while an advanced AI repairs every bug. People are told to stock up on food, gold and weapons. According to Kazakhstan's Zakon.kz it comes from a post in Portuguese by an X user reportedly based in Brazil. The post itself says the source is unconfirmed, and it names neither the source nor a hacker group. In Russian-language media it now goes by the name "digital apocalypse".

Some of those articles mix in real security news to make it sound urgent: Amazon spotting attacks from 17 October, and Cloudflare counting millions of attempts. Those facts are real, but they are about PHP2Shell, two flaws in the PHP programming language made public on 21 October. Attackers use them to break into individual websites that have not installed the fix. That is serious for those sites, and it is nothing like a switch for the whole internet: in the three weeks since, no country went dark because of it. The same articles say organisations in Finland and Japan took their services offline as a precaution; they name none, and we found no report of it.

It doesn't hold up. The internet is not one machine: it is tens of thousands of separately run networks, with no central switch, and no single flaw takes it all down. Even Facebook's 2021 failure, one of the largest ever, took one company offline for about six hours. Kazakhstan's emergency ministry says it has issued no warning of this kind, and that it never told people to stock up before 17 November. Brazil's fact-checking site Boatos.org has rated both the blackout claim and the Simpsons "prediction" false.

Another date doing the rounds, 13 November, comes from a 1960 article in the journal Science titled "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026". It was a calculation about population growth, not a forecast of a blackout or of anything else happening on that day.

Where the rumour comes from

The date is not random. On 2 November Japan launched its new Disaster Management Agency (防災庁), and on its first day the minister in charge, Goshi Hosono, issued an "emergency request": keep water and food for at least three days, ideally a week, secure furniture and appliances, and check where your evacuation site is. The word "emergency" made many people think something specific was coming. Hosono answered that on X on 29 October: the request "is not prompted by any prediction of an earthquake or other disaster"; it marks the agency's launch and a push to prepare in advance. On social media the gap was filled with guesses anyway: a world war, a coming Nankai Trough earthquake, and now a global blackout.

There is no world grid to switch off

Electricity does not run on one worldwide network. It runs on separate grids, each covering one country or a group of neighbours, often linked only by a few cables. Japan itself has two: the east runs at 50 Hz and the west at 60 Hz, and they can only exchange a limited amount of power through converter stations. When a grid fails, the failure stays inside that grid. The biggest blackouts of recent years show exactly that.

What our data shows

Our power outage pages use Cloudflare Radar's Outage Center, which records power cuts big enough to show up in internet traffic. Since January 2022 it has recorded 140 of them, in 65 countries (as of 10 November). On no single day did more than three countries lose power:

25 January 2022, Central Asia Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, which share one old Soviet-era grid.
21 June 2024, the Balkans Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro (Croatia's coast was hit too) during a heatwave.
28 April 2025, the Iberian Peninsula Spain and Portugal, for most of a day. Morocco's internet was affected through its connections with Spain.

Even the largest of these stayed within one region. Radar only lists outages that affect internet traffic, so smaller local cuts are missing, but a global one would be impossible to miss.

What actually happened on 1–3 November

Power cuts happen somewhere every day, and the days around the rumoured date were no different. Each of them stayed local:

1 November, Peru A failure on the national grid cut electricity across northern Peru; Radar saw internet traffic in Piura drop from 19:45 to about 22:30 UTC (afternoon local time).
2 November, Washington, D.C. About 1,100 customers around Foggy Bottom lost power after a problem at a substation of the local utility, Pepco. Power was back by the afternoon. Some posts linked it to the US midterm elections; Pepco said there was "no indication of foul play".
2–3 November, Ukraine Grid companies announced rotating cuts by group in several regions, as they have since attacks on the country's power system.

On 3 November at 01:30 UTC our probes saw the internet working normally in 248 of 250 countries and territories. The two exceptions: Barbados, where only part of our test points answer, as on 31 October, and Chad, where most of our test points stopped answering at 00:05 UTC. The cause was not known at the time; Chad's internet has had nationwide outages before, from cut fibre links to shutdowns. It came back at 03:15 UTC, about three hours later. One country, not the world.

3–10 November: one more week, still no global blackout

The week after was the same picture. Everything our probes and Cloudflare Radar recorded stayed inside one country, and most of it lasted minutes or hours:

3–4 November, Ukraine Damage to energy facilities cut power in the Zhytomyr region overnight, and internet traffic there dropped with it.
5 November, Benin Part of the country's internet stopped answering our probes twice for about 25 minutes, in the morning.
5 November, Aruba A failure at a power plant of the island's utility, WEB Aruba, cut electricity across the island for about two hours in the afternoon (local time).
7 November, Central African Republic A partial internet outage of about two hours, and another of 20 minutes on 10 November.
8 November, Ukraine Strikes on energy infrastructure cut power in the Dnipropetrovsk region for most of the day.

On 10 November at 16:20 UTC our probes saw the internet working normally in all 236 countries and territories we could measure at that moment. On 17 November, the box at the top of this page shows the same live count.

You can watch this yourself on the live map: power cuts are shown with ⚡, and every country can be followed for a notification when its internet goes down. We show what we measure. We never predict outages.

The same rumour, new dates

"Global blackout on date X" is a rumour that keeps coming back. We keep the full list here. This year alone fact-checkers took apart a "NASA warning" for March, a "nine-day global blackout" on 18 July and a "two-minute blackout" on 12 August, which was in fact the date of a total solar eclipse. After Spain and Portugal lost power in April 2025, posts claimed it was the start of a "three-day global blackout". None of these happened, and none came with a source anyone could check.

What could hit many countries at once

The one natural event that can damage grids on several continents is a severe solar storm. The 1989 storm left Quebec without power for about nine hours. But solar storms are watched constantly: when the Sun throws out a cloud of particles, space weather centres such as NOAA's see it leave and publish a warning, usually one to three days before it arrives. A real threat like that would come from them, in public, not from an anonymous post.

Should you prepare anyway?

Yes, but not because of a date. Japan's advice is good for any storm, earthquake or long power cut: water and food for three days to a week, a way to go to the toilet without running water, a battery radio and charged power banks. For alerts about your own area, follow your national emergency service and your grid operator (in Spain, for example, Red Eléctrica). Blackout Map is an independent monitor, not an official source.