It turns out there’s an even more straightforward conspiracy theory than anything I suggested: someone had something to hide from a second Trump presidency; the crash of millions of computers was a great cover for the loss of that data; and the moment when Trump’s candidacy was officially confirmed, was as good a time as any to pull the plug.
Pursuing this angle probably won’t help with either AI doomscrying or general epistemology, so I don’t think this is the place to weigh up in detail, whether the means, motive, and opportunity for such an act actually existed. That is for serious investigators to do. But I will just point out that the incident occurred during a period of unusual panic for Trump’s opponents—the weeks from the first presidential debate, when Biden’s weakness was revealed, until the day when Biden finally withdrew from the race.
edit (added 9 days later): Decided to add what I now consider the most likely non-coincidental explanation, which is that this was an attack by state-backed Russian hackers in revenge for CrowdStrike’s 2016 role exposing them as the ones who likely provided DNC emails to Wikileaks.
Nothing you have said seems to make any sort of conspiracy theory around this more plausible than the alternative, namely that it’s just chance. There are 336 half-hours per week; when two notable things happen in a week, about half a percent of the time one of them happens within half an hour of the other. The sort of conspiracies you’re talking about seem to me more unlikely than that.
(Why a week? Arbitrary choice of timeframe. The point isn’t a detailed probability calculation, it’s that minor coincidences happen all the time.)
It turns out there’s an even more straightforward conspiracy theory than anything I suggested: someone had something to hide from a second Trump presidency; the crash of millions of computers was a great cover for the loss of that data; and the moment when Trump’s candidacy was officially confirmed, was as good a time as any to pull the plug.
Pursuing this angle probably won’t help with either AI doomscrying or general epistemology, so I don’t think this is the place to weigh up in detail, whether the means, motive, and opportunity for such an act actually existed. That is for serious investigators to do. But I will just point out that the incident occurred during a period of unusual panic for Trump’s opponents—the weeks from the first presidential debate, when Biden’s weakness was revealed, until the day when Biden finally withdrew from the race.
edit (added 9 days later): Decided to add what I now consider the most likely non-coincidental explanation, which is that this was an attack by state-backed Russian hackers in revenge for CrowdStrike’s 2016 role exposing them as the ones who likely provided DNC emails to Wikileaks.
Nothing you have said seems to make any sort of conspiracy theory around this more plausible than the alternative, namely that it’s just chance. There are 336 half-hours per week; when two notable things happen in a week, about half a percent of the time one of them happens within half an hour of the other. The sort of conspiracies you’re talking about seem to me more unlikely than that.
(Why a week? Arbitrary choice of timeframe. The point isn’t a detailed probability calculation, it’s that minor coincidences happen all the time.)