At a US Intelligence Committee hearing this afternoon, Sen. Barbara Mikulski confronted FBI Director James Comey with some real talk about the strange shitstorm of tech failures today: The New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal all went down, citing technical difficulties.


“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Mikulski said. “Is the FBI investigating these as breaches?”

“We’re not big believers in coincidence either,” Comey said... before insisting that this was, in fact, a coincidence. “We’ve been in contact with all three companies to see what’s going on. We don’t see a connection to a cyber breach or cyberattack.”


Comey cited an overwhelming flood of interest in the NYSE meltdown as the reason for the Wall Street Journal’s technical failure.

In another coincidence, the United States Government Accountability Office published a summary of a study today calling for the need for stronger protections for federal agencies in the face of increased cyberattacks and data breaches.

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