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The world is trying to recover Friday from a global IT outage sparked overnight that’s caused massive problems for airlines, 911 emergency systems, shipping companies, banks, TV broadcasters, and a host of other major industries. And while the cause has now been well established, the conspiracy theorists believe they know the real reason this is all happening: In short, they think Democrats like Barack Obama caused the outage to mess with Donald Trump. Seriously.
In reality, the outage was kicked off by new code pushed out by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike in the early morning hours of Friday, which really did a number on computers running Microsoft Windows. The issue rippled across the entire world, first raising major alarm bells in Australia given the simple fact that it was the middle of the day on that side of the globe.
But the conspiracy theorists on X think they know the “real” reason that all of this has happened. And the most popular theory right now is that it’s all part of a plot to mess with Donald Trump, who gave one of his rambling and hateful speeches last night at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, despite promises that his tone would dramatically change to one of unity after the attempt on his life.
Far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who attended the RNC in Milwaukee and has close ties to Trump, pushed the bizarre theory on social media Friday, attempting to tie together a number of threads.
“Did you know that the President of CrowdStrike Services and the Chief Security Officer served as the Executive Assistant Director of the FBI under the Obama-Biden administration,” Loomer wrote on X Friday.
Why would that matter, according to Loomer? It’s apparently suspicious because the outage “happened during President Trump’s nomination speech at the RNC Convention.” And if someone ever worked in government under a Democrat, they must be working against Trump in this way. The problem with that theory, or one of many problems, is that the outage was a very minor issue for a small subset of users when Trump was speaking, according to Reuters. The worldwide issues wouldn’t flare up into a global problem until the early morning hours of Friday after Trump had finished his speech. If the goal was to disrupt Trump’s speech these plotters probably should’ve started earlier in the day.
🚨🚨🚨Did you know that the President of CrowdStrike Services and the Chief Security Officer served as the Executive Assistant Director of the FBI under the Obama-Biden administration? 🚨🚨🚨
Weird how the CrowdStrike @CrowdStrike global outage happened during President Trump’s… pic.twitter.com/fklzj4DWMi
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) July 19, 2024
But Loomer didn’t leave it there. Her long tweet also tried to implicate the FBI somehow, ending with the question, “Why is every crisis in our country somehow tied to @BarackObama?” Loomer, of course, has long been a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t take responsibility when her wildly inaccurate tweets are inevitably proved wrong. Very recently, Loomer tweeted that President Joe Biden had experienced a medical emergency on Air Force One, despite the fact that Biden was seen entering and exiting the aircraft just fine. That didn’t stop Loomer from continuing to insist she had been right, as guys like Elon Musk seemed to eat it up on social media.
And you’ll notice that blaming Obama for the outage has a nice through-line to blaming Biden, given the fact that he was VP under the 44th president. Trump rather infamously helped create the so-called birther conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, which would have made him ineligible to become president. And Trump’s extreme racism drove much of his animus toward Obama, who has been a singular fixture in the mind of Trump for over a decade now. Trump has even gotten confused in recent months, saying Obama when he meant Biden at least three times at rallies in the past year. So it makes sense that Trump-aligned conspiracy theorists would still be obsessed with Obama.
Illuminati Signs and Sam “Bankmen Freid”
But it’s not just Obama. The online dipshit community sees signs of conspiracy everywhere, including in the innocuous hand gestures of newscasters. For example, an account called Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPsycho) tweeted “Legacy Media Sky News Presenter doing that thing again……” while posting a video about the outage from the UK’s Sky News.
Legacy Media Sky News Presenter doing that thing again…… 👀 pic.twitter.com/m91iyDrUmt
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) July 19, 2024
If you have no idea what the account is referring to, that’s because you’re normal. The account is trying to point to the newscaster’s hands and the belief that Illuminati symbols are displayed by people making triangular shapes. In this case, the woman in blue briefly puts her hands together and conspiracy theorists believe it’s a secret hand symbol for some global elite.
Then there’s an account called @prolotario1 which went much more broad with the accusations, creating a grab bag of just about every possible conspiracy theory from the past five years. You’ve got Ukraine, Joe Biden, and a misspelled Sam “Bankmen Freid” of crypto company FTX. And, of course, this conspiracy theorist manages to slip Barack Obama into the mix.
“The servers are located in Ukraine. Can you say election interference? This is a Deep State cybersecurity company. People this is a National Security threat. What did D. Trump receive officially yesterday?” the account rambled.
The conspiracy theorists continued by blaming “those in the Democratic Party” while making some very confusing accusations that can probably only be understood by people very deeply versed in the most unhinged right-wing lore.
“Do you now know that the bulk data collected on this outage is going to be given directly to Donald Trump?” the tweet reads, though it’s not entirely clear what that means. “People this reaches the highest level of government. People ask yourself why is this all coming out hours after D. Trump took his nomination at the RNC? Did he tell you on July 10th that the final battle takes place in 7 days right? Now look at all the events that has transpired since you went to sleep.”
People listen to me. If you do not think today is massive on a historical scale let me inform you about CrowdStrike. The servers are located in Ukraine. Can you say election interference? This is a Deep State cybersecurity company. People this is a National Security threat. What… https://t.co/YkqdEXJa34
— Ariel (@Prolotario1) July 19, 2024
That tweet has over 900,000 views on X at the time of this writing, likely driven by the fact that it’s from an account with a blue checkmark. Before Musk bought Twitter, the blue checkmark was simply a way to fight against impersonation. But Musk stripped legacy accounts of their checkmarks and now any idiot with $8 to spend can get “verified,” despite the fact that X doesn’t actually verify someone’s identity or reputation.
Leave the World Behind with Obama
And it wouldn’t be 2024 without someone mentioning the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind. That account Concerned Citizen also posted a video Friday that tried to suggest Obama’s involvement in that movie was evidence he’s orchestrating a plot to take down the nation’s computer systems.
“Barack Obama made a movie called ‘Leave the World Behind’ whereby a cyber blackout plunged the entire World into chaos. It’s almost as if they knew,” the account tweeted.
“Am I watching a movie or is this a documentary”
“2024 is going to be very chaotic”
Barack Obama made a movie called ‘Leave the World Behind’ whereby a cyber blackout plunged the entire World into chaos.
It’s almost as if they knew. pic.twitter.com/72JUO0llTZ
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) July 19, 2024
Plenty of other X users tried to spread this idea that Leave the World Behind was actually a way of taunting the world in advance of major disruptions that would come in the future, like Edward Farina who wrote, “the movie shows how a cyberattack caused a major blackout in the United States. #WEF Cyber Polygon. This is a warning for things to come. The Elites are evil. A Dark Friday.”
This movie and Obama’s involvement have sparked conspiracy theories ever since it first came out, and when AT&T suffered a nationwide outage back in February, social media lit up with people who insisted there was a connection. Still, another theory was that Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponent in the 2016 race, must have been behind Friday’s global IT outage.
“The Massive Microsoft Outage Happening Right Now Linked to Crowdstrike Is The Cybersecurity Company Hired By Hillary Clinton & The DNC To Investigate Russia’s Alleged Breach In The DNC!” X user Liz Crokin tweeted Friday.
Crowdstrike already deployed a fix and Microsoft has been sending out instructions on how to get Windows machines back up and running, including a strange suggestion that users try turning their computers on and off again… 15 times. Nobody knows for sure when things will return back to normal for everyone. But the one thing we can say for certain is that the outage wasn’t caused by Barack Obama or any other political operative to sabotage Trump. There are a lot of good reasons to try and sabotage Trump’s agenda, given the fact that he’s promising an extreme plan built on neo-fascist ideas. But taking down major computer systems across the world would be a really stupid way to do that.
