So I went to fill up the car yesterday morning, nothing dramatic, just running low before a work thing across town, and the Sunoco on the corner had a piece of paper taped over the pump that just said "NO GAS" in Sharpie. Fine, whatever, I drove to the next one. Same deal. Third station had a line wrapped around the building and a guy in a truck ahead of me filling up not just his tank but two five-gallon jugs in his bed. That's when it clicked that this was the pipeline thing.
If you haven't been paying attention (honestly fair, it's been a weird year to keep up with anything), Colonial Pipeline got hit with ransomware last Friday and took their whole system offline as a precaution. This is the pipeline that moves something like half the fuel used on the East Coast, gas, diesel, jet fuel, all of it, running from Texas up to New Jersey. A criminal group locked up their billing systems and Colonial shut down the pumps themselves rather than risk it spreading, and now half my region is white-knuckling it over a tank of gas like its 1979. Colonial says they're restarting operations today, so hopefully this calms down in a day or two, but the panic buying got ahead of the actual shortage days ago, which is sort of the whole problem with panic buying.
I want to be clear I'm not writing this to explain ransomware to anyone, if you read this blog you already know what ransomware is. What's been stuck in my head instead is how weirdly analog the consequences are. A criminal gang somewhere (reportedly a group called DarkSide, apparently they even issued some mealy-mouthed statement about how they're "apolitical" and just in it for the money, very reassuring) encrypts some servers, and two days later there's a woman in Alabama filming herself pumping gasoline into plastic grocery bags in her trunk. Plastic bags. For gasoline. I don't think anyone on either end of that ransom negotiation was picturing that as the second-order effect, but here we are.
The thing that actually bugs me, as someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time thinking about servers and backups for a blog nobody reads, is how much of this seems to trace back to boring infrastructure hygiene stuff. Old VPN credentials, flat networks where the billing system apparently touches enough of the operational side that shutting one down means shutting down the other. I run this blog off a cheap little VPS, I've got automated backups going out nightly, and my "disaster recovery plan" is more thought out than what a company moving fuel to a hundred million people apparently had. That's not a brag, it's genuinely alarming when you sit with it for a second. I use Tricknowtech for the domain and hosting on this thing precisely because I don't want to think about servers more than necessary, and even I've got redundant backups configured for a hobby project. A pipeline company should not be losing to the same playbook that gets a random WordPress blog popped.
Anyway. I topped off at station number four, paid $2.79 a gallon, felt slightly ridiculous doing it, and drove home past two more stations with bags over the pump handles. My particular metro area apparently wasn't hit that hard compared to Georgia and the Carolinas, where I'm hearing actual station-by-station outages, not just jumpy people topping off early. There's something almost funny about the fact that the shortage was made mostly of people's reaction to the shortage, and something not funny at all about how a single company's bad week with a hacking group turned into a regional event that had nothing to do with computers by the time it reached my street.
I don't have a tidy point to land this on. Mostly I just wanted to note it down before it fades, because in a month this will be "remember that pipeline thing" and in five years it'll be a footnote, and right now it's a guy filling grocery bags with unleaded on my timeline. Fill your tank if you need to, don't fill your tank if you don't need to, and maybe go check when your own backups last actually ran, because apparently nobody's exempt from finding out the hard way.