Wednesday, December 15, 2021
On May 7, 2021, a ransomware crew shut down the pipeline that carries nearly half the East Coast's fuel, and panic buying, not the outage, emptied the pumps.
On this day in 2021, the largest fuel pipeline in the United States went dark. On May 7, a ransomware group called DarkSide broke into Colonial Pipeline's business network, and the company shut down the line that carries about 45 percent of the East Coast's gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel rather than risk the attack reaching the controls. The outage lasted six days.
The shortage that followed was built mostly by the response. As word spread, drivers rushed to top off tanks and fill spare cans, and a whole region trying to hold a full tank at once drained stations faster than the closed pipeline ever could. The federal government eased fuel-trucking rules across 17 states and Washington, D.C. By the time the pipeline restarted on May 12, Charlotte had 71 percent of its stations dry, and Washington, D.C. would reach 87 percent, days after fuel was already moving again.
The lasting lesson is how little the attackers had to do. The full account of how a distant breach became a gas line lives in our look at the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack, one clear case of the way every man made disaster reaches an ordinary home through the same few systems.
The households that barely noticed had a few quiet habits. They kept the tank above half, set aside cash for when card readers failed, and had the calm to let the frantic first days pass. Four years on, ransomware against pipelines, utilities, and hospitals is more common rather than less, which makes an anniversary like this a good prompt to check your own plan while the lines are short.
