The global IT outage that occurred overnight has caused major disruptions for airlines, emergency systems, shipping companies, banks, TV broadcasters, and other industries worldwide. While the cause has been identified as new code pushed out by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, conspiracy theorists are claiming that Democrats, specifically Barack Obama, orchestrated the outage to sabotage Donald Trump. However, the outage was a minor issue during Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention and only escalated after he had finished speaking. Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, has been pushing this unfounded theory on social media, trying to link the outage to Obama and the FBI. Despite evidence to the contrary, these conspiracy theorists continue to blame Obama and other Democratic figures for the global IT outage. Additionally, some online accounts are seeing signs of conspiracy in hand gestures of newscasters and linking the outage to Obama’s involvement in the Netflix movie “Leave the World Behind.” Overall, these conspiracy theories lack evidence and are fueled by extreme right-wing beliefs and misinformation.
