4 ms·

Electrical failure cuts power to all of Argentina and Uruguay, supplier says

42 points by jpalomaki 7y ago

forinti 7y ago
El Pais of Uruguay says some parts of the interior have power.
japasc 7y ago
UFF, no internet, I have to talk to my wife and kids....
canada_dry 7y ago
> causing trains to be halted and failures with traffic signalling. It came as people in parts of Argentina were preparing to go to the polls for local elections. According to this: https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-calendar https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-ca... ... there are only a couple Gubernatorial elections, so likely unrelated. With all the talk of the USA ramping up efforts to disrupt Russia's power grid, could it be that some out-in-the-wild exploit hit an unintended target? I couldn't find any info on who provided Argentina with their equipment.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Electrical power issues are very common in Buenos Aires (blackouts in blocks of the city, as well as very poor quality of the delivered power, resulting in damages to power supply units). I'd rather bet on the general dysfunction of the state rather than a concerted external effort.
- Nerdfest 7y ago
  It thought the opposite was in progress now, with external actors doing deep scans on electrical infrastructure in the US. Regardless of direction, if I were to start a conspiracy theory, I'd point out that testing in a country that already has poor infrastructure would be great cover. Seriously though, I'd think it would be trivial to figure out if this was failure or malice.
- gmuslera 7y ago
  This seem to be a good example of Hanlon's Razor. Uruguay and Argentine energy systems are interconnected because we sell each other energy when there is too much demand, and how that connection was made caused the outage to spread to Uruguay.
anticensor 7y ago
A similar outage happened in Turkey back in 2015.
samcday 7y ago
Does something like this ordinarily receive an extremely in-depth and public post-mortem?
- heartbreak 7y ago
  Extremely in-depth? Yes. Public? No.
- Dangeranger 7y ago
  That depends on the country of origin and the cause. If this happened in the US it would require an extensive filing with NERC and most likely several public hearings before regulators and lawmakers. Then laws would be written to attempt to prevent the incident in the future. For example, see the repercussions from the 2003 Northeast Blackout [0]. If this was caused by state actors, in part or whole, then I would expect most hearings and reports about it to be less public, and occur behind closed doors. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
rocqua 7y ago
Am I the only one linking this to the news of America having infiltrated Russian power plants? Given the timing, it feels like some state flexing.
- forinti 7y ago
  I thought about that too. Maybe they were trying something new on a development environment, or testing something that should have worked in production. That would be funny.
- lewdikris 7y ago
  i was thinking this too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, this has never happened before to thaw two countries, and it comes right after the nyt article. It’s definitely a message
mardoqueo 7y ago
Pretty weird situation, and it's election day here in Santa Fe province. Luckily cell towers stood online all the time. Now slowly coming back. Follow energy demand live from here: http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx
leovernazza 7y ago
Hi guys, I am a software engineer from Uruguay. I know nothing about electricity systems. We are being told by authorities that there is no better system design than this. That is, Uruguayan network is interconnected to Argentina, what gives us more robustness. If something small/medium fails here, Argentina compensates, and viceversa. This has improved our system for many years. However, it seems to have this very improbable issue. If something big happens in Argentina (which is much bigger than us), there is no way Uruguay can supply the energy they need to keep running. Is there any other way to interconnect two electric networks (having more robustness for the normal cases) but avoiding this kind of high-impact issues? From a computer network point of view, this doesn’t make much sense, but there are physical limits here I guess... Why can’t we just have some kind of limit condition to switch the connection off, instead of trying to rescue the other network? Thanks for your explanation.

42 points by jpalomaki 7y ago

forinti 7y ago

El Pais of Uruguay says some parts of the interior have power.

japasc 7y ago

UFF, no internet, I have to talk to my wife and kids....

canada_dry 7y ago

> causing trains to be halted and failures with traffic signalling. It came as people in parts of Argentina were preparing to go to the polls for local elections. According to this: https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-calendar https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-ca... ... there are only a couple Gubernatorial elections, so likely unrelated. With all the talk of the USA ramping up efforts to disrupt Russia's power grid, could it be that some out-in-the-wild exploit hit an unintended target? I couldn't find any info on who provided Argentina with their equipment.

H8crilA 7y ago
Electrical power issues are very common in Buenos Aires (blackouts in blocks of the city, as well as very poor quality of the delivered power, resulting in damages to power supply units). I'd rather bet on the general dysfunction of the state rather than a concerted external effort.
Nerdfest 7y ago
It thought the opposite was in progress now, with external actors doing deep scans on electrical infrastructure in the US. Regardless of direction, if I were to start a conspiracy theory, I'd point out that testing in a country that already has poor infrastructure would be great cover. Seriously though, I'd think it would be trivial to figure out if this was failure or malice.
gmuslera 7y ago
This seem to be a good example of Hanlon's Razor. Uruguay and Argentine energy systems are interconnected because we sell each other energy when there is too much demand, and how that connection was made caused the outage to spread to Uruguay.

anticensor 7y ago

A similar outage happened in Turkey back in 2015.

samcday 7y ago

Does something like this ordinarily receive an extremely in-depth and public post-mortem?

heartbreak 7y ago
Extremely in-depth? Yes. Public? No.
Dangeranger 7y ago
That depends on the country of origin and the cause. If this happened in the US it would require an extensive filing with NERC and most likely several public hearings before regulators and lawmakers. Then laws would be written to attempt to prevent the incident in the future. For example, see the repercussions from the 2003 Northeast Blackout [0]. If this was caused by state actors, in part or whole, then I would expect most hearings and reports about it to be less public, and occur behind closed doors. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

rocqua 7y ago

Am I the only one linking this to the news of America having infiltrated Russian power plants? Given the timing, it feels like some state flexing.

forinti 7y ago
I thought about that too. Maybe they were trying something new on a development environment, or testing something that should have worked in production. That would be funny.
lewdikris 7y ago
i was thinking this too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, this has never happened before to thaw two countries, and it comes right after the nyt article. It’s definitely a message

mardoqueo 7y ago

Pretty weird situation, and it's election day here in Santa Fe province. Luckily cell towers stood online all the time. Now slowly coming back. Follow energy demand live from here: http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx

leovernazza 7y ago

Hi guys, I am a software engineer from Uruguay. I know nothing about electricity systems. We are being told by authorities that there is no better system design than this. That is, Uruguayan network is interconnected to Argentina, what gives us more robustness. If something small/medium fails here, Argentina compensates, and viceversa. This has improved our system for many years. However, it seems to have this very improbable issue. If something big happens in Argentina (which is much bigger than us), there is no way Uruguay can supply the energy they need to keep running. Is there any other way to interconnect two electric networks (having more robustness for the normal cases) but avoiding this kind of high-impact issues? From a computer network point of view, this doesn’t make much sense, but there are physical limits here I guess... Why can’t we just have some kind of limit condition to switch the connection off, instead of trying to rescue the other network? Thanks for your explanation.