If only the world economy ran on tears and sympathy instead of recorded transactions. I should pray that all my utility and food providers function without charging me money... until they go bankrupt and I am left with neither.
You'd probably be pretty pissed if your electricity provider suffered a ransomware attack on its billing system and then decided to stop your heating completely on its own accord because it can't know if you're paying your fair share.
Texas recently shut down their power grid when it got cold out because it was cheaper than weatherproofing or suffering the regulations to interconnect with other neighbouring states.
Grandparent commenter with "Austin" in his name was saying his power gets shut off even w/out ransomware. Parent commenter asked "when?" and I answered the question.
I'm not taking a position on the similarity or dissimilarity between shutting down a service because you can't bill accurately and shutting down a service because you refuse to interoperate with other providers.
All I'm saying is Texas customers did get their electricity cut off recently.
The Texas power grid didn’t run out of fuel either. It was known there needed to be controlled outages a couple weeks in advance. What wasn’t known was the scale or duration of the problem.
At any rate you are just looking for something to cry about. You asked for a hypothetical counter example not expecting to get one and now are splitting hairs to qualify big tears.
>The Texas power grid didn’t run out of fuel either.
"As of Wednesday morning, when the power outages were at their most severe, the cold had snuffed out about 46 gigawatts, or about 40 percent, of power-generation capacity in the state."
Sounds a lot like the grid did in fact run out of "fuel" (as in the product that they deliver).
>You asked for a hypothetical counter example
Of an electricity provider cutting power of its own accord because their billing service was not functioning, not because the electricity production in Texas dropped due to freezing while demand shot up.
There are some restrictions on when the utilities can shut off your power, water, electricity, etc. Whether gasoline should be regulated like a utility is an interesting question. Given how dependent on cars most Americans are, seems like a reasonable conversation to have.
