Free Republic

Official won't rule out cyberattack The Turkish capital, Ankara, some 250 miles from Istanbul, was also affected. The outage extended to 45 of Turkey's 81 provinces. Turkey's semiofficial Anadolu Agency quoted Energy Minister Taner Yildiz as saying the cause of the outage was unknown. Yildiz, speaking during a visit to Slovakia, said he could neither confirm nor deny that a cyberattack had triggered the blackout, the Anadolu Agency reported. Flightradar24, which maps real-time flight data on the Internet, tweeted that the outage was "affecting flights," and said 11 of its 16 air traffic monitoring systems receivers -- as distinct from...

1) What happened in Turkey on March 31? At 10:36 a.m., a massive blackout hit Turkey. Out of the 81 Turkish provinces, electricity was not totally cut only in the eastern province of Van, which receives some of its energy from Iran. In total, more than 76 million citizens were affected in one way or another. Described by the Energy Ministry as the worst national blackout since the 1999 Marmara earthquake, the outage wreaked havoc in daily life throughout the country with mass transit and traffic lights ceasing to work, hospitals sounding the alarm, factories halting production, mobile phone connections...