Are we drifting into world war?

There is of course Ukraine. There was Gaza. There is Maduro. There are Colombia, Taiwan, Greenland.

There is Iran.

And there seem to be warnings that the next world war will involve widespread technological aspects.

Have we received warnings (threats) already, by way of tech blackouts? (If at some point you can’t get spiritdaily.com, try our backup, spiritdaily.org).

In the early hours of this week, millions of Americans were met not with the familiar sound of a ringtone, but with silence and confusion. Across vast regions of the United States, customers of Verizon woke to find their phones in “SOS only” mode — cut off from calls, texts, and mobile data Wednesday. Even emergency services were affected, with reports that some 911 calls failed to connect during the disruption.

Yet no clear explanation has been offered by authorities as to what caused one of the nation’s largest telecommunications networks to go dark. No storm. No natural disaster. No visible culprit. Just silence where there should have been connection.

This was not merely an inconvenience — it was a stark reminder of how deeply modern life is entwined with invisible systems we barely notice until they fail.

A Troubling Pattern — Not an Isolated Incident

This Verizon outage aligns with a broader pattern of major infrastructure disruptions affecting communications, electricity, and internet services across North America and Europe in recent years. The list includes:

• AWS and Cloud Services Failures (2025): Major internet infrastructure providers, including Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, suffered outages that knocked hundreds of popular apps and sites offline across the U.S. and Europe.

• Social Network Blackouts (2025–2026): Large social platforms saw widespread service interruptions, leaving millions unable to communicate digitally for hours at a time.

• European Telecom Interruptions: Multiple national network interruptions have been reported in Europe, often attributed to “technical issues,” though with scant detail about underlying causes.

• Ukraine Power and Telecommunications Disruptions:
One of the most severe ongoing examples is the toll of Russia’s sustained attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid and communications infrastructure. In early January 2026, Russian drone and missile strikes caused extensive blackouts across Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, leaving more than a million households without power in freezing winter conditions.

Officials report that Kyiv and other major cities have experienced rolling emergency power cuts due to repeated strikes on substations and power plants, while efforts to restore services continue amid harsh weather.

In addition, networks have been intermittently degraded, with power losses knocking out wireless infrastructure and reducing mobile network capacity. One of Ukraine’s largest telecom operators warned that nearly one-third of its network was knocked offline by blackouts tied to these energy disruptions.

These events — in war zones and in peacetime societies — point to systemic vulnerabilities whose causes are not always fully disclosed.

“Glitch” Has Become a Convenient Word

In each case, official statements lean on broadly reassuring terms:

• configuration error

• unexpected network behavior

• software anomaly

Such phrases calm public anxiety, but they rarely satisfy deeper questions:
Why are these failures happening more frequently?

Why is so little detail shared with the public?

How can “accidental” breakdowns disrupt entire nations?

Is There a Deeper Message?

It’s tempting to dismiss each outage as a one-off technical failure. But when power, telecom, and internet networks falter — across friendly democracies and conflict zones alike — a pattern of fragility emerges. Systems that underpin commerce, healthcare, safety, and daily life remain concentrated in a few centralized networks and providers.

And yet, when these lines go dark — even briefly — chaos ripples outward in ways that few modern societies are prepared for.

“When the signal dies, we discover how much we truly depend on it.”

Whether the latest Verizon outage was a simple error or a symptom of deeper structural brittleness, one thing is clear: our digital age assumes permanence in systems that were never meant to carry such existential weight.

In a world of increasing complexity and conflict, vigilance and resilience are no longer optional. They are essential.