Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cyberwarfare

Nationwide Power Cut Paralyzes Turkey

A massive power cut caused chaos and shut down public transport across Turkey on Tuesday, with the government refusing to rule out that the electricity system had been the victim of an attack.

A massive power cut caused chaos and shut down public transport across Turkey on Tuesday, with the government refusing to rule out that the electricity system had been the victim of an attack.

The nationwide power cut, the worst in 15 years, began shortly after 10:30 am (0730 GMT) in Istanbul, the state-run Anatolia news agency quoted the Turkey Electricity Transmission Company (TEIAS) as saying.

It was confirmed to have hit 49 of the country’s 81 provinces, from the Greek border to those in the southeast neighbouring Iran and Iraq and including Istanbul and the capital Ankara.

Power Outage Hits TurkeySeveral hours later, swathes of Turkey including much of Istanbul were still without power, although public transport systems such as metro lines appeared to be working again.

“Every possibility, including a terrorist attack, is being investigated,” said Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu after the magnitude of the outage became clear.

He said a crisis cell has been established at the energy ministry to handle situation, which occurred as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was out of the country on a visit to Slovakia.

Possible ‘cyber-attack’

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz also said the authorities were investigating whether the power outage was due to a technical failure or a “cyber-attack.”

“The most important thing for us is to bring the system back to life. This is not something we frequently experience,” said Yildiz, who was travelling with Erdogan.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

He later sought to calm tensions, saying power had already been restored to several regions and the whole country “would be fully energised again soon”.

“We reached 90 percent levels in Istanbul. God willing, there’s not going to be a major problem,” he said.

“It is too early to say now if it is because of a technical reason, a manipulation, a faultplay, an operational mistake, or a cyber (attack). We are looking into it… We cannot say they are excluded possibilities.”

Education Minister Nabi Avci said power would be fully restored nationwide by 8 pm (1700 GMT).

The energy ministry was quoted as saying by Turkish media that a power cut on this scale had not been seen in 15 years.

The blackout trapped people in elevators while the metro systems in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir all stopped working for several hours.

Rescue teams rushed to subway stations to evacuate stranded travellers and bring them to the surface.

Traffic lights also were not working in several spots in Istanbul and Ankara, causing huge traffic jams, with officers taking to the streets in an attempt to break the logjams.

The Marmaray metro line which goes underneath the Bosphorus in Istanbul also went down while high speed train services from Ankara were also halted.

Around three hours after the power cut struck Istanbul, the metro, tramway and the Marmaray underground system came back on line and resumed operations.

Power was being gradually restored to Istanbul with some reports claiming that 80 percent of the city had power again. However many private homes and offices were still without power.

In the heavily industrialised city of Izmit, near Istanbul, the cuts prevented many factories and workshops from functioning.

Severing of power lines

There were conflicting initial reports about the cause of the outage, but Turkish grid operator TEIAS said it resulted from a severing of power lines between Europe and Turkey, and warned it could take hours before electricity is restored.

The Chamber of Electrical Engineers of Turkey, however, claimed that it occurred because some private power suppliers had refused to sell electricity due to low prices.

The DHA news agency said almost all provinces in Turkey were affected, except Van province in the east which imports electricity from neighbouring Iran.

Conspiracy theories did the rounds on the Internet, with the situation the top trend under the hashtag #BuradaElektrikYok (There is no electricity here).

There was no immediate indication that the situation was linked to the hostage drama ongoing in Istanbul where a radical leftist group took a prosecutor hostage at a courthouse and threatened to kill him.

The cut came at a particularly tense period in Turkey ahead of June 7 legislative elections and with Erdogan increasingly polarising society.

The government is seeking to make peace with Kurdish militants while also dealing with the advance of Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Iraq and Syria up to the Turkish border.

RelatedRegister Your Interest For the 2015 ICS Cyber Security Conference

RelatedSouth Korea Nuclear Plants Stage Drill Against Cyber Attack

RelatedSouth Korea’s ‘Top Gun’ Cyber Warriors

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON - Cyberattacks are the most serious threat facing the United States, even more so than terrorism, according to American defense experts. Almost half...

Cyberwarfare

Russian espionage group Nomadic Octopus infiltrated a Tajikistani telecoms provider to spy on 18 entities, including government officials and public service infrastructures.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Malware & Threats

The NSA and FBI warn that a Chinese state-sponsored APT called BlackTech is hacking into network edge devices and using firmware implants to silently...

Cyberwarfare

Several hacker groups have joined in on the Israel-Hamas war that started over the weekend after the militant group launched a major attack.

Application Security

Virtualization technology giant VMware on Tuesday shipped urgent updates to fix a trio of security problems in multiple software products, including a virtual machine...

Cybercrime

On the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, cybersecurity companies summarize the cyber operations they have seen and their impact.

Cyberwarfare

The war in Ukraine is the first major conflagration between two technologically advanced powers in the age of cyber. It prompts us to question...