Is Someone Hacking DoD Refrigerators?

It sure seems like it.

The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installation.

Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif., also experienced an outage, according to M. Elizabeth, writer of the Substack newsletter Signal and Silence.

Each service declined to answer questions about how many bases are affected by the outages, referring all questions to the Defense Department. Pentagon officials did not respond to questions.

However, a defense official said the department is aware of a “possible refrigeration disruption at some Defense Commissary Agency commissaries.” The official was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

All speculation at this point, but it’s hard to come up with another explanation for the coincidence.

Posted on August 31, 2026 at 2:20 PM3 Comments

Comments

Bcs August 31, 2026 2:43 PM

Seems like a good data point for the argument that things that don’t fundamentally need a computer to operate should be usable with the computer physical removed. Sort of a cyber security version of a battleshort.

Montecarlo August 31, 2026 5:07 PM

I’m not sure a hacker has to be involved. I can’t remember the last time I bought an appliance that actually worked properly.

This may simply be a case of the refrigerators being optimized to reduce energy consumption (probably by a vibe coder).

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