I agree its reasonable to speculate, given its a particularly vulnerable time in democracy with US election in 35 days and there's a lot to gain in disruption.

I agree its reasonable to speculate, given its a particularly vulnerable time in democracy with US election in 35 days and there's a lot to gain in disruption. Obviously MS/Apple/Google are all the juiciest targets for acquiring private communications, something that can (and possibly did) change the outcome of an election. I would expect this is an extremely active time in attack/defense in cybersecurity regardless of this incident. IF this is the case, what do we think this could be? What's common among the different outages? Google says 9/24's outage was traffic routing hardware. [1] Microsoft says 9/28's outage was authentication error due to a bug in a service update, deployment tooling error, and a bug in rollback [2] Apple's has affected many services including Apple ID but it isn't clear what root cause is. [1] https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1309313556328841216 https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1309313556328841216 [2] https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/ https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/