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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been issuing an emergency directive that requires all federal agencies to take immediate action in response to the rising cyber threats to critical infrastructure. On September 25, 2025, CISA issued Emergency Directive 25-03, which directs the agencies of the U.S.
Federal Civilian Executive Branch to detect, evaluate and remove risks of a possible breach of Cisco networking equipment. The order is issued against the backdrop of active exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls and operating systems that are widely used, and hackers are already in government networks.
The vulnerability of the legacy hardware in the face of advanced attacks is already too old of a problem that a rush across federal IT departments to spot and protect their environment before the end of the night before midnight.
There could not be a better time than now. The patches are needed by noon Eastern Daylight Time on September 26, and the agencies are scrambling to provide protection to systems that support it all, businesses, and government-wide communication of national defence to information sharing in health.
With the sun coming up on this critical Friday, cybersecurity analysts are also sounding the alarm that the ripple effect may spread way above Washington, with a possible vulnerability of the private sector networks to the same risks.
These proper intrusions can be linked to a secret hacking program that has gone unnoticed for almost two years. Security researchers dubbed it ArcaneDoor, and the attack started to emerge in November of 2023, with the first signs of compromise being discovered on Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) devices.
What began as a small number of defects has now escalated into a full-scale attack with hackers using unknown vulnerabilities to carve through the core of networks. The two vulnerabilities, CVE-2025-20333 and CVE-2025-20362, have a high severity level and are at the core of the breach.
The former enables unauthorised distant attackers to execute arbitrary code on susceptible devices, in effect forfeiting administrative control without even a password request. The second opens a backdoor to limited areas of management that allows intruders to probe sensitive settings without being spotted.
The vulnerabilities mainly focus on Cisco ASA and Firepower Threat Defence (FTD) software, especially on 5500-X Series firewalls, in which VPN web services are configured, a widely used configuration in government configurations to allow remote access security.
However, the danger is not limited to this. Similar attacks have struck Cisco IOS and IOS XE operating systems, which are the backbone of routers and switches running large portions of the internet.
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) implementation vulnerability CVE-2025-20352 is a zero-day vulnerability that allows low-privileged users to cause denial-of-service crashes or elevate their privileges to root-level, enabling remote code execution.
Cisco has estimated that as many as two million devices in the entire world may be vulnerable, and many thousands of them may be in enterprise and government fleets. Attackers have been seen to combine these bugs in succession to install enduring malware, overwritten device software to endure reboots and software updates.
It is the chilling sophistication. After access, hackers use specialised programs such as a Line Dancer, and in-memory shellcode loaders, which allow them to bypass antivirus scans, and Line Runner, a low-profile backdoor to command interception. They turn off logging in order to hide tracks, impersonate legitimate traffic to blend in with it, and even crash equipment in strategic places, so that forensic evidence can be cleared.
It is not an opportunistic crime, but a planned spy game, due to the UAT4356 threat group – or STORM-1849, according to Microsoft experts – which is largely suspected to be a state-sponsored aggressor that has intentions towards U.S. intelligence.
ArcaneDoor is not a flash in the pan. It dates back to mid-2023, when the ecosystem of Cisco was targeted by exploit developers. Towards the end of last year, the campaign had recorded victories of high-profile targets, including the defence contractors and operators in the energy sector.
The revelations of this week were a sharp uphill point, as there have been established breaches in various federal agencies. An official of CISA, who was addressing the matter on anonymity, said that the intrusions are a major threat to the networks of the victims, and their evasion techniques have stretched the time of detection up to months.
The campaign characteristics are screamer advanced persistent threat (APT). Intruders prefer techniques that are instituted on the land, which involve repurposing built-in Cisco tools to steal the data instead of using a noisy payload.
In one reported case, hackers stole CLI commands to intercept administrator sessions and harvest credentials, enabling them to move laterally across segmented networks. Alternatively, it may compromise the read-only memory (ROM) by inserting hardware-level backdoors to make the standard patching procedure useless unless the device has been wiped.
Security organisations monitoring the group mention the overlaps with the previous activities, such as the use of CVE-2024-20353 and CVE-2024-20359 as part of the previous Cisco IOS bugs. It is a trend of a focused group that is refining its art against the American technology powerhouses, which may be a prelude to wider disruptive actions.
According to one of the researchers in a briefing during one of the late nights, this was the digital version of the bugs planted in the Oval Office, without any noise, long-term benefit, and silent.
The directive of CISA cuts through the bureaucracy like a razor blade. Released as a part of the Federal Information Security Modernisation Act, ED 25-03 commits all FCEB agencies to a zero-tolerance schedule.
By midday EDT today, September 26, all the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency outfits will be required to comb their inventories of the affected Cisco equipment. This includes the use of CISA forensic toolkit a set of scripts and indicators of compromise (IOCs) to search evidence of suspicious activity such as suspicious SNMP queries or maliciously altered firmware hashes.
In the case of compromised devices, the rule is very clear: disconnect now and put them in a sandbox to study them. The uncompromised units are provided with a grace period to implement Cisco’s newly released patches, but that is only until the deadline. Agencies that cannot upgrade should explain why they need more time, but CISA has expressed limited sympathy.
To make the situation more urgent, all ASA devices that reached end-of-support have to be decommissioned by September 30, no exceptions. The instruction is straightforward: “Legacy platforms are not able to withstand modern dangers, and this should not be surprising given decades of warnings about unupgraded hardware.
Best reporting is a top-down process. The agencies provide weekly reporting via the CISA secure portal, including scans and patches, and exfiltrated data. Failure to comply may also lead to defunding or congressional oversight, which would serve as a deterrent as much as shared threat intelligence serves as a carrot. Already, virtual interagency task forces are being established, which are sharing resources to triage the most vulnerable assets in sectors such as transportation and healthcare.
On its part, Cisco acted fast. The company implemented fixes to its product lines on September 24 and asked customers to switch on multi-factor authentication on management interfaces and segment VPN traffic. These vulnerabilities are dangerous, the security advisory from Cisco suggests, and it recommends conducting vulnerability scans and firmware integrity checks as soon as possible.
Intrusion prevention systems have also been open-sourced with detection signatures by the vendor to defenders, who can now use proactive filters. The playbook follows the CISA model in other organizations not under the umbrella of the federal: Inventory all Cisco appliances, focus on high-risk exposures such as internet-facing firewalls, and test the patches in staging systems to prevent outages.
The experts promote the use of defences in layers, including zero-trust architectures, behavioural analytics, and frequent red-team exercises, in order to soften the zero-day edge. Patching is table stakes, says an experienced network engineer. And the actual victory is the act of presuming breach and constructing strength in the wake of it.
The Cisco story is heard all over the world. With millions of gadgets in play, commercial players in finance, utilities and telecommunications are shaking off playbooks, dreading collateral damage.
According to the stock watchers, the shares of Cisco declined last night, but the company did not pay much attention to systemic risks. Allies such as the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK, which was also responding to the request by CISA, put out similar alerts to NATO allies.
The case intensifies an irritating reality: supply chain bottlenecks such as Cisco control enterprise networking, giving one point of vulnerability to attack. The consumers are pressuring vendors to establish security by design as quantum threats increase and the automation of attacks accelerates. Stricter requirements may be in reaction, too, as regulators may extend the remit of CISA to critical infrastructure in the private sector.
Cybersecurity gurus are raising their voices. One of the key analysts at one of the largest threat intelligence companies says ArcaneDoor demonstrates that zero-days become campaigns. The state actors are not only breaking down the door, but redesigning it. The other specialist points to the human factor: overstretched IT departments having to balance alerts, usually not finding the time to update the firmware until it is too late.
On the upslope side, there is some opportunity. This pushes modernisation, contends a think tank policy wonk. The article titled, “Ditching end-of-life gear paves the way to secure-by-default clouds and edge computing,” states. Cisco bugs are being called out in open bounty forums, intent on crowdsourcing fixes before its enemies can use them as weapons.
With the September 26 deadline looming, cyber fortifications of the U.S. government are on the anvil. ED 25-03 is not simply a patch note, but a wakeup call to the vulnerability management process in the hyper-connected world. Victory here may stem the flow and rebuild belief in the underlying technology. Defeat may lead to a wave of attacks that may tear away society and make more ambitious adversaries.
But there is a determination in the hurry. With the help of Cisco and the vigilance of the industry, federal teams are gradually regaining ground. The scramble of today may be remembered in the annals of cyber warfare as not a downturn, but the turning point towards the immeasurable networks. Meanwhile, the catchphrase is watch: search, patch, and hope the back doors are put in place before more of the darkness gets into the house.
The world is still trying to come to terms with the consequences of the recent lockout of the global devices; however, tech giants are betting even more on an ambitious idea for the future, in which smartphones, the eyes of online life, will be related to history.
By September 21, 2025, industry giants such as Apple, Google, and Meta, as well as newcomers like Neuralink, are competing to reinvent humanity’s interaction with technology. The future, with the development of augmented reality (AR) contact lenses and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), promises seamless connectivity built into the structure of our bodies and spaces.
This transformation that has been accelerated by the recent crises of exposing the vulnerabilities of smartphones is set to transform economies, societies and even human consciousness. This is the way the tech world is transforming to the post-smartphone world.
The smartphone is a cultural powerhouse of almost twenty years, but is ageing. The recent 30/30 attempts remaining crisis, which encrypted billions of gadgets, demonstrated the weakness of the centralised, handheld systems.
Everything reached its peak with smartphones, asserted a high-level employee of one of the Silicon Valley conferences, who asked not to be identified because of ongoing investigations. The event that paralysed not only banking applications but also hospital records highlighted a serious shortcoming: the overdependence on a single gadget in identity, communication and productivity.
The market trends respond to this. The smartphone sales have been stagnant in the world, and a 2 per cent growth is projected in 2024, according to IDC analytics. Customers are demanding more than what they have received in previous years, with incremental upgrades and planned obsolescence.
In the meantime, the environmental issues regarding lithium mining and e-waste 5.3 billion discarded each year (WEEE Forum) are making regulators implement measures to reduce the device churn. The laws of the EU on the Right to Repair, as well as the mandatory carbon neutrality of the technologies in China, have already increased the pressure, forcing the companies to reconsider the handheld paradigm.
Enter the visionaries. Tech companies, which have more than half a trillion dollars in cash reserves, are betting on entirely screenless ecosystems. In an address at Google headquarters, the company’s chief innovation officer declared that the future is not a device that you keep in your pocket, but instead technology that is assimilated into your life. This is a seamless, invisible, ubiquitous mantra that is causing a tectonic shift in investment and innovation.
First of all, there is augmented reality, which will superimpose digital information onto the physical world. The Vision Pro by Apple in 2023 was an embarrassment of a first attempt, but its sequels are less crass and more daring. In a secret demonstration at Cupertino, Apple showcased prototypes of AR contact lenses, dubbed Vision Pro.
These are lenses that can display notifications and maps, and virtual assistants, and project them onto the retina, all powered by micro-LED display and graphene batteries. The first testers said that the experience felt like having the internet in your eyes, and that the controls were gesture-based, implemented into smart rings.
Meta, which cannot be left behind, is scaling up its Orion project. Plans to launch lightweight AR glasses, which will become part of its metaverse platform since it is now called Horizon Worlds 2.0, were leaked.
These glasses are not a big headset; however, as opposed to bulky ones, they look like a stylish pair of Ray-Bans, which, to some extent, combine style and functionality. Meta CEO tells investors in a 3rd-quarter earnings call that the company is transitioning off the screen to the physical world of spatial computing.
Their metaverse gamble that cost them 50 billion is being trailed as remote work and virtual tourism take off, with 300 million monthly active users projected in August 2025. In addition to consumer technology, AR is transforming industries. Surgeons in Shanghai have implemented AR visors at the Huashan hospital, where they overlay real-time MRI scans in brain operations, which reduces the time of the cutting process by 30%.
Dubai smart city designers are incorporating AR windshields into autonomous cabs, which display traffic information and cultural facts to passengers. Such uses are pointing to a new era where the digital and physical worlds are blended, and smartphone screens will no longer be necessary.
In case AR updates the way we see, brain-computer interfaces are supposed to update the way we think. Elon Musk’s FDA-approved and user-tested Neuralink: Neuralink One was featured in the news on Neuralink, a neurotech startup of Elon Musk. The coin-sized gadget, which is implanted in the skull, lets users operate the computerised world by just thinking.
Even paraplegic volunteers have streamed music, typed messages and even played chess by operating solely with neural signals. Musk tweeted that the smartphone was an intermediary; we’re bypassing it, and it would be a 15% increase in the private value of Neuralink, which reached 20 billion dollars.
Rivalry is right behind them. Blackrock Neurotech and Synchron are commercialising BCIs to be used in medical and consumer applications, and have been used in restoring speech in ALS patients and telepathic messaging.
A non-invasive headband-based BCI, named NeuroLink, was demonstrated at a technology exhibition in Tokyo, in which brainwaves can be read and sent to the game console. The demo, which proposed a gamer through a virtual samurai duel that used control-free swordplay, was viral and received 2 billion views on decentralised sites.
The consequences are overwhelming. BCIs might eliminate the need for passwords altogether, and the neural signature used for user authentication is unhackable. But there are ethical issues that cast a large shadow. Privacy activists fear brainjacking or hackers being able to intercept thoughts or even control feelings.
An Oxford 2025 study estimated that 60 per cent of consumers are worried that their data in BCI will get leaked, and the EU is preparing Neuro-Rights legislation. Tech giants are playing the role of promising quantum encryption, but confidence is weak after being locked out.
In addition to wearables and implants, the future is in ambient intelligence- environments that learn and react to the needs of human beings. The Astro 2.0, an Astro home robot with a contextual AI, is able to control the schedules, health, and even pick groceries off of the delivery drones.
The Samsung SmartThings ecosystem is an integrated smart environment in Seoul, incorporating appliances, lighting, and security into one AI-controlled platform that can be operated by voice or eye control. In January 2025, Samsung announced a $10 billion investment in IoT, with one of the company’s CEOs stating that a smartphone is the new home in their speech at CES.
The cityscape is also changing. The Smart Nation project of Singapore inserts sensors in the infrastructure of the state, and this includes the lights of the streets as well as a bench, forming an OS in the city that manages traffic patterns and the consumption of energy in real-time.
Phones are not a part of the services, as residents use biometric kiosks to access them. The satellite mesh, which today covers 95 per cent of the world, is used in rural locations of Starlink to provide high-speed internet to wearable patches so that farmers in sub-Saharan Africa can track crops with an AI-controlled skin sensor.
This change does not come without resistance. Small businesses are yet to recover following the lockdown, and ambient upgrades are unaffordable to them, which poses a danger of having a digital divide.
Mom-and-pop shops have been dependent on outdated devices in India, which have 1.2 billion smartphones in working condition, and they cannot support the new ecosystems. Governments are intervening. The Tech Inclusion Act in Brazil subsidises AR glasses to low-income families, but scaling up is difficult.
The future is full of challenges on the way to the post-smartphone world. The problem of interoperability is a nightmare; the walled garden of Apple collides with the open successors of Android offered by Google, and the cross-platform avatars in the metaverse of Meta are rejected. Post-lockout is one of the priorities that cannot be compromised.
The Aegis Shield debacle that revealed back doors in encryption protocols has caused a reckoning. An increasing pressure on companies to move to decentralised ledgers is now emerging, as identity systems based on blockchain are being piloted in Switzerland and Estonia.
Socially, there is excitement as well as dread in the transition. Gen Z, who grew up on TikTok and VR, are enthusiastic about AR and BCIs, with 70 per cent of Gen Z indicating the willingness to wear neural implants, according to a Pew Research survey.
However, older generations are still attached to smartphones, scared of intrusive technology. I want a phone that works, ” grumbled a 65-year-old retired man in a focus group in London, and this is echoed by 40 per cent of seniors around the world.
Yet the dream persists. It could be a morning in 2030: you get up, and your AR glasses display a customised warning about what you need to know that day, such as weather, email, and heart rate, and your coffee self-appears.
In the workplace, a BCI provides an idea stream straight to a collaborative virtual whiteboard. During the evening, ambient sensors turn lights off and start playing music when you enter your home, all without requiring any manual interaction with equipment. This is what tech giants are creating in the future: not a device, an extension of you.
This move out of smartphones is not a technological one but an existential one. It questions the sense of being connected, to be human. The future is brought about by the disappearance of devices, letting the experience take centre stage: a child in Nairobi studying through a holographic tutor, a Tokyo artist drawing a 3D picture, and a New York nurse saving lives thanks to holographic brain diagnostics.
The recent lockout was an eye-opener, and we realised how weak our digital foundations were. At this point, tech giants are not only rebuilding but also redefining to recover. This revolution will not be cheap and fast. It requires trillions of R&D, infrastructure and education to bridge the gap.
But the tide can never be stopped. One of the Neuralink engineers stated that we are not a place of the smartphone, but we are the replacement of the necessity of the smartphone. In a world where technology is becoming invisible, and everywhere one can find it, there is only one boundary, the desire to dream- and the possibility to protect the structures we create.
In an electronic disaster that has crippled the contemporary world, billions of smartphones, computers, and smart gadgets globally are showing an ominous sign: type in password to unlock 30/30 left to attempt.
This unique glitch, possibly a cyberattack, has brought economies to a halt as of September 21, 2025, affected emergency services, and caused panic by itself, which is unprecedented. Wall Street traders who were frozen in the middle of their trades, and families who could not use life-saving medical apps, the consequences are nothing less than apocalyptic.
Analysts are alarmed that each time they fail to log in, the clock runs out, and there is a risk of losing data forever among millions of people. It is the account of the cracking of the internet backbone, and its impact on our hyper-connected future.
The tech giants were taken by surprise when the crisis broke out immediately after midnight UTC. The first reports came out of Silicon Valley, where early morning in California, people discovered that their iPhones and Android devices were not responsive and that the usual lock screen was substituted with the dreadful prompt.
Within several hours, the phenomenon spread like an online wildfire across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Social media sites, which at first seemed unavailable to others, were full of desperate posts by people who posted screenshots of the frozen interfaces. One of the journalists in London even tweeted that her phone is holding me hostage, and then her account went dead.
The most frightening part about this event is that it is universal. It has not only stopped at a single device, be it the newest Apple Vision Pro headset, a tough Samsung Galaxy to fit in the field, or even the systems built into a car and a home assistant.
This sensitivity of the message, 30/30 attempts remaining, is indicative of a design flaw in authentication protocols that was intentionally done, but its abrupt occurrence is indicative of something far more malevolent, a coordinated exploit of the very heart of biometric and multi-factor authentication systems.
The investigators are in a race against time to identify the source. Early investigation by cybersecurity companies such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks indicates that a rogue software update was forced via major operating systems at night with the intent of harming the system.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft all put out emergency statements that they are not responsible, although logs found on servers not affected show that there is at least a common theme: an emergency patch has been developed that specifically fixes quantum-resistant encryption, and that this was aimed at enhancing defences against current threats posed by AI.
The project, known as codenamed Aegis Shield, was a joint venture between the three Big Tech companies that was introduced to meet the strict requirements of the European Union Digital Resilience Act.
Nonetheless, there is an insider talk that the code was hasty, with unvetted modules by third-party vendors in Eastern Europe. In an anonymous call to the company, a member of the Google engineering team admitted that they were so preoccupied with quantum computer-proofing that they were ignoring present-day back doors.
Not all people purchase the accident story. The NSA is also being investigated in the U.S. by other intelligence agencies in connection with state-sponsored attackers. There are also whispers in Washington corridors that the opponent countries are involved in it, perhaps as retaliation against new sanctions on semiconductor shipments.
This is not a bug, it is a weapon, announced the FBI Director Elena Vasquez, in one of her infrequent public speech appearances at the headquarters of the agency in Virginia. Satellite images show irregular actions by outposts of computer server farms in remote Siberian outposts, and this has triggered speculation of a hybrid cyber-physical attack.
The timing couldn’t be worse. As world markets edge closer to the verge of a recession and tensions mount in the South China Sea, this lockout has exacerbated the existing fault lines.
New York and Tokyo Stock Exchanges closed down due to the first trading halt in more than a year since the 2022 crypto crash, as algorithms, ironically, run on the locked systems, rejected orders. Airlines suspended their fleets because they could not confirm the validity of their pilots, and hospitals reported that their surgeries were delayed due to inaccessible electronic health records.
The price paid in human life is increasing per hour. In New York City, a mother (mother Maria Gonzalez) once told local reporters that her morning nightmare outside one of the cordoned-off Apple Stores went like this: My diabetes application locked me out. I was unable to adjust the right dosage of insulin.
Had it not been an old flip phone belonging to one of the neighbours, I would not have made it to the clinic. Her stories reverberate all over the world. Traffic in Mumbai was brought to a standstill with smart lights blowing red lights, resulting in a miles-long traffic jam. The facial recognition checkpoints on Beijing subways collapsed, resulting in a scramble as well as claims of fighting.
Corporate America is ailing as well. Productivity in Fortune 500 companies such as Amazon and JPMorgan Chase has reduced by 80 per cent, with remote employees not able to access or use VPNs and cloud drives.
The Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who was on a live backup analogue line, complained, ‘We are back to pen and paper; we had a hastily called boardroom huddle.’ The supply chain implications are dismal: container ships floating off ports in Los Angeles, with frozen automated manifests, a threat of fresh produce shortage by the end of the week.
Even the safest industries are not safe. Bases in the U.S and NATO allies went to manual overrides, but not without classified briefings being interrupted. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, no national secrets were compromised, although the event highlighted a vulnerability in the Joint All-Domain Command Control system. The Gulf of Mexico oil rigs reported pump breaks in the energy industry, which in turn drove up the price of crude overnight to $120 per barrel.
The lockout has created a weird fraternal spirit socially. In suburbs all the way across Seattle to Sydney, block parties were held in neighbourhoods as people barbecued and shared anecdotes about analogue workarounds like physical keys, printed directories, and so on.
But behind the coerced nostalgia is great anxiety. Hotlines of mental health, ironically, one of the limited services that have not been axed as it has legacy landlines as a justification, have been inundated with calls from elderly clients who are frightened by the thought of permanently losing family photos and memories.
Cybersecurity luminaries are raising an alarm never before seen with exquisite urgency. Dr Lena Kim, chief researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, presents a viral video essay: This is the canary in the coal mine of our over-reliance on digital locks.
It is a mental torture, 30 tries and every time you fail, you lose faith in the system. The team led by Kim has reverse-engineered the prompt and found out that it contains a self-replicating worm that is transmitted through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which is why it spreads so quickly.
Unsung heroes are coming up on the ground. In Berlin, hackers (organised as a collective of ethical hackers named Unlock United) have presented a jury-rigged universal bypass of this technology based on clusters of Raspberry Pi and distributed via USB sticks in libraries.
We are not breaking the law; we are repairing access,” their spokesperson, a 22-year-old prodigy named Alex Rivera, said to a mass of people. Other grassroots activities in Tokyo and Sao Paulo have reinstated partial capacity to thousands, but the problem is the difference in scale.
The testimonials of the users give a portrait of frustration and resourcefulness. Tech influencer Jordan Hale (following 5 million) wrote about his experience in a series of Polaroid pictures: Day 1: Laptop dead. Day 2: Branded passwords on my arm. Day 3: Bargaining with Siri ghosts.
The light-hearted version by Hale has been seen by millions of people on alternative platforms such as decentralised fediverse networks, which bring a ray of light into the darkness.
World leaders held a virtual G20 meeting through hastily put-together satellite connectivity. U.S. President Carla Reyes proclaimed a digital emergency on a nationwide level, mobilising the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide so-called analogue kits with notepads, maps, and wind-up radios. She promised with a vow reminiscent of the Reagan era, America will not be ransomed off by code.
In Brussels, the EU Commissioner of Digital Affairs, Thierry Laurent, said that a EUR50 billion bailout of the affected SMEs would occur, as well as a moratorium on any further software updates until independent audits clear them.
The Ministry of State Security in China was always a secretive organisation, but this time it released a statement to the effect, pointing to external vile elements and it said that 95 per cent of its features had been restored under its Great Firewall. However, reports by dissident networks are worse, as the rural villages are isolated.
The heads of tech companies were held to answer in a collective press conference broadcast out of a neutral Swiss chateau. Tim Cook of Apple, looking dishevelled, made amends often enough: we have let you down, but our teams will be working twenty-four hours a day.
Google and Microsoft also echoed the feeling, announcing a plan to roll back in phases. Phase one, currently in progress, puts the attempt counter to infinity for verified users through a temporary SMS gateway. Phase two will guarantee a forensic detective inquiry, with bounties of up to $10 million for the cause of the problem.
The regulators are like sharks around the block. The Federal Trade Commission of the U.S. initiated antitrust investigations of the Aegis Shield alliance, arguing that the market dominance inhibited stringent testing. In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office warned that it would impose fines of more than PS4% of worldwide revenues in case personal data is seen to be compromised.
Greenshoots of recovery are emerging even on the second day of the crisis. Iceland has become a beacon of isolated networks, powered by geothermal redundancies, they have become home to mirrored services of international aid.
Trying to implement radical remedies to the issue, quantum computing whiz kids at Oxford University suggest a move to blockchain-based authentication, with passwords becoming dynamically generated through user biometrics and environmental hashes.
To individuals, the lessons learnt are bleak. Physicalize your online existence — have a dead man’s switch journal of essential logins, buy Faraday bags to enable the isolation of devices during updates, and support open-source alternatives, which prioritise transparency.
Governments need to place mandates on single points of failure to act as finders of failures, such that failure in one place can be mitigated or transferred to the world at large. It is not a technology glitch that this lockout issues, but rather a settling of scores. It demonstrates how weak our invisible infrastructure, the strands of code that hold society together, are.
When the counters were marking off 30 to zero, one fact is that in the machine age, strength is not programmed; it is human. Through joint hard work and swift adjustments, we will be able to restart on a better footing, and when another red flag is raised, it will not be the end, but rather an isolated case in our resilient narrative.
Apple has verified that the iPhone 17 Pro, which is coming out in September of 2026, will have the capability of 65W wired charging, the fastest charging ever available, which requires a total redesign of the charging accessories and is going to spark contentious debates on e-waste and the pricing of the devices to the consumer.
The bombshell, which was leaked on September 20, 2025, via supply chain whispers and confirmed by teardowns, is the most aggressive move in power delivery by Apple in decades, in that the company wants to reduce charging time to less than 30 minutes on the proposed 5,000mAh battery in the device.
Following tech enthusiasts analysing schematics and environmentalists panicking over discarded cables, it is not only about speed that this upgrade is so high-voltage; it is also a statement in the EV-themed competition over who can refuel their phone as quickly as possible.
As competitors such as Samsung and Google are trailing at 45W, Apple will have the power to create new parameters to charge high prices, although at a cost of losing long-time supporters who will have to upgrade their phones against their will.
The information appeared through an in-depth investigation of a well-known leaker, Ice Universe, who tore down early prototypes distributed among Foxconn engineers. The 65W throughput is made possible by Apple changing to a next-gen USB-C port with improved thermal management, a 30 per cent increase on the 45W limit of the iPhone 16 Pro.
It is not just a speculation, as FCC filings silently revised on Sept. 19 to suggest power adapters with 65W ratings, full of the proprietary Apple safety measures to avoid overheating. To the uninitiated, existing iPhone chargers have a maximum stock power of 20W, and third-party alternatives have a maximum power of 30-45W using Qi2 wireless standards.
The architecture of the iPhone 17 Pro, with its use of gallium nitride (GaN) for efficiency, is expected to charge 80 per cent in 20 minutes, which is comparable to flagship Androids, but the architecture of the iPhone, with its legendary battery life.
Getting under the hood, the charging jump that Apple made is based on a three-legged stool: a refined A19 Pro chip with built-in power management, a more powerful battery chemistry with silicon-anode technology to get a denser battery, and dynamic adaptive voltage regulation that varies output according to ambient temperature and load.
According to supply chain reports issued by DigiTimes, these components will be produced by the 2nm process node offered by TSMC and allow finer control of the electron flow so as to reduce heat accumulation- an age-old Achilles heel in fast charging.
The port itself changes, as well: the thinner USB-C port supports 240W in principle, but is limited to 65W to fit the iOS devices, which Apple insists on its sustainable speed philosophy. The MagSafe 2.0 takes wireless charging to 25W and adds rings of ferromagnets to enhance the alignment and efficiency of the process.
In ideal conditions, with early testing, the iPhone 17 Pro would charge in 28 minutes with minimal thermal throttling, according to those within the company, 9to5Mac. This follows Apple’s silent move away from Lightning and its full adoption of USB-C, driven by EU requirements, but now tuned to power-hungry AI functions such as improved Siri processing and on-board generative models.
Opponents also note the small print: To get to 65W, it will need a new charger since the current 20W bricks will only negotiate down to 30W max to be safe. Even cables will need to be superseded to E-Marker spec to support higher amperage, which will likely break older systems.
It was compared by one engineer to the act of putting a V8 engine in a Model T car, which worked, but was not the best. Apple’s response? The wireless bridges can be redesigned to be modular, with the current MagSafe pucks becoming wireless bridges, making the impact less severe.
The accessory market of $50 billion is seismic regarding the ripple effects. Apple-certified partners Belkin, Mophie, and Anker scrambled into overdrive with teases of 65W GaN chargers with built-in cooling fans, with a promotion of 10,000 bends of durability, and offering a braided-cable feature.
Prices? The projected retailer price of Apple’s official brick is $59, third parties will be selling at $39, and 2-meter cords will be included. This is not hyperbole; the pre-order lines of compatible kits at Amazon shot 400% through the night, and reactions were mixed as some welcomed the move, while others became frustrated by the rush to purchase the MagSafe duos since 2020.
The retailers, such as Best Buy and Apple’s stores, are preparing to confront a new charge on a tidal wave, similar to the AirPods Pro 2 release hype. According to Counterpoint Research analysts, accessory sales will rise 25 per cent in Q4 2026 (but caution of e-waste spikes): Billions of useful 20-45W chargers will find their way to landfills, adding to the current 53 million tons/year of worldwide e-waste.
This is a blow to Apple green, even though, under carbon-neutral pledges by 2030, the forced obsolescence response to this is the resemblance to the 2017 headphone jack scandal, which iced out criticism by such organisations as Greenpeace.
On the other side, there is innovation that flowers. Nimble has solar-powered 65W packs using recycled plastics and is an eco-hero, and ESR has foldable stands with inbuilt fans and is aimed at desk warriors.
To the power users, who are in fact videographers who will be editing 8K ProRes simultaneously, the speed edge is worth the price, allowing them to do their business with smooth operations without having to be chained to the power outlet half of the day.
The gambit of Apple is felt in Silicon Valley and Seoul. After Galaxy S25 teasing 50W, Samsung is under pressure to keep or even surpass, leaks indicate that Earth may push its foldables to 70W.
The lineup of Google Pixel 10 mired in Tensor G5 delays may jump to 55W, although the antitrust suit impacts the fast pace of development. With no Western rules, Huawei already proudly presents 100W SuperCharge, which makes China the home of hyper-speed.
Watching stock: Apple fell 0.8% on the sustainability front, whereas the parent of Anker rose 3.2% on volume surges. Supplier of GaN chips, Broadcom, gained a market capital of $12 billion, which emphasises the interlinked pulse of the supply chain.
Venture capital is heading in the same direction; a company in the Bay Area, ChargeForge, recently raised $15 million in inductive technology, which uses no cables whatsoever. The upgrade is being celebrated in global emerging markets such as India, which is the growth driver in Apple, with 15 million iPhone shipments by 2025, because faster charging will go hand in hand with an unpredictable power supply.
However, the question of affordability is evident: The $100 and above accessory package may be seen as a hindrance to adoption, according to IDC projections that predict shaving 2% off emerging-market growth.
The scandal of ecology lies at the centre of the controversy. The 65W push offered by Apple guarantees efficiency; the technology behind the GaN reduces energy loss by 40 per cent, according to the UL tests, which could save gigawatts every year for users.
On September 20, Tim Cook, on a subsequent investor call, billed it as progress without compromise, which included greater EV synergies such as bidirectional charging in CarPlay. Critics such as the Basel Action Network deplore the so-called planned obsolescence trap and have projected a figure of 200 million obsolete chargers in 2027.
A solution is suggested: Apple has been rumoured to give old bricks a trade-in that is redeemed in 10-dollar credits, or pairing with recyclers such as Redwood Materials. Third parties are also innovative- universal adapters that communicate several protocols, and their life lasts longer on the cable.
One of the viral X threads said: 1 viral X thread remarked: Apple is making chargers NFTs: Buy one, upgrade one, discard one, etc. The controversy drives the demand for the right-to-repair legislation, and EU investigations are directed towards the closed ecosystem of Apple.
It is a two-edged sword for the consumers. The power addicts enjoy sub-30-minute top-ups, which allow them to do AR exercises or neural rendering. Families that have devices more than one use shared 65W hubs, which simplifies the mornings.
Nevertheless, the eco-anxiety is imminent: A YouGov poll after the leak indicated that 62% of iPhone owners are concerned about the additional waste that is generated, and this compels Apple to make more radical choices in the direction of the circular economy.
The internet broke out in response. In the r/Apple sub, the discussions were active and reached up to 50K likes, with some celebrating the pause of 2-hour charges and others complaining about a new round of additional charges.
Thanks, Tim.” The presence of such influencers as MKBHD showed mockups, applauding thermal curves but criticising cable requirements. Weibo in China was buzzing with Huawei fanatics boasting of 120W domination, and Indian discussion forums were discussing the effect of EMI on wallet-share.
Anecdotes make the transition human: A Los Angeles photographer stated that 45W bottles caused death to the shoots; 65W signifies going back to making, not waiting. On the contrary, one of the students in Berlin lamented: My 20W on iPhone 12 is fine- why are we being punished for being thrifty?
With prototypes going to assembly lines in Zhengzhou, the WWDC 2026 is being looked at as the official release date, and beta leaks are expected in Q2. Apple can add some sugar by offering bundled chargers with Pro kits, or benefits to the ecosystem, such as free upgrades with Apple One. Legal hurdles? There are minimal, but class actions which hang over the head in case of backward compatibility failure.
Long-term view, this solidifies the Apple charging throne, making the industry move to 100W standards by 2030. However, it highlights a conflict: The exaltation of Innovation or the need to be a Steward.
At a time when the world is finite, 65W is not volts; it is a voltage of values. Big Tech is struggling to power forward without consuming the world. When the iPhone 17 Pro starts and the phone starts humming, the question arises: Will speed take the lead, or will sustainability take off?
Lighting up a deal with Oracle to speed up a massive network of data centres, in a blockbuster disclosure that is rewriting the rules of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, Meta Platforms is in deep talks to sign a multi-year, $20-billion deal with Oracle on September 20, 2025, as sources close to the negotiations revealed.
Assuming the deal was completed, it would be one of the largest deals in the history of cloud contracts, which highlights the relentless ambition of Mark Zuckerberg to dominate competitors such as OpenAI and Google in a bloodthirsty market of generative AI.
The stock market is awakening with new rumours about the deal: Does it give Meta the juice to take the lead in the next round of AI breakthrough, or is it a brave last effort at the infrastructure arms race? This would be a game-changer in the digital domination battle, as AI spending is projected to reach $ 300 billion by 2026. Thus, this prospective agreement is not an ordinary business deal, but a key chess move.
It was announced in a storm of last-minute news, and even experienced analysts were taken by surprise. The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta, has been intensively expanding its AI capacity since the release of its Llama models, but insiders reckon that the existing cloud infrastructure, consisting of Microsoft Azure and its own-brand hardware, is straining under the load of training larger language models.
Oracle, which is enjoying the reputation of its OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) platform as an excellent high-performance computing platform, comes out as an unlikely saviour. The acquisition would also be said to give Meta priority access to Oracle’s expansive GPU clusters, which are optimised to train AI-based workloads, and this would shorten the training time by several weeks to days.
To put it into perspective, the AI research division of Meta will eventually use more electricity than certain small nations, and this funding is likely to speed up the innovation in all aspects of the personalised content algorithms for the metaverse agents, which are self-reliant.
Primarily, the suggested contract will be five to seven years in duration; however, as time goes by, sources added, Meta would invest at the minimum amount per year that would increase with time. The second-generation cloud architecture used by Oracle has an advantage over its rivals because it has a lower latency and higher throughput on AI tasks in comparison with hyperscalers such as AWS or Azure.
Its capability to operate in massive parallel processing, i.e. millions of Nvidia H100S working in concert, fits quite well with the goals of open-source AI hegemony of Meta. It has been publicly promised by Zuckerberg to democratize AI with Llama, but secretly, the company is scurrying to create proprietary moats, such as custom silicon chips known as MTIA ( Meta Training and Inference Accelerator ).
TikTok is the first time that Oracle and Big Tech are dancing, as the company has struck agreements with TikTok and Zoom, but a deal of $20 billion with Meta would be massive and bring billions to Oracle’s top line overnight. At recent earnings calls, CEO Safra Catz has been boasting of the AI capabilities of OCI, its unmatched elasticity to peak workloads such as model fine-tuning.
In the case of Meta, the time is perfect: Only a month ago, the company announced that its capital expenditures increased by 22 per cent to reach 8.1 billion, mostly on AI infrastructure. However, the slowness of Nvidia in launching its Blackwell chips has had hyperscalers scrambling, and Oracle has been able to offer some capacity that is ready to deploy immediately.
Critics, however, doubt the wisdom of such concentration. Investigators of antitrust in Brussels and Washington are already examining Meta’s empire, and allocating a fifth of its AI budget to a single vendor may draw attention. In addition, the history of Oracle has had security hiccups in the past, and this is an issue of concern in an era where data breaches are worth billions.
One technology consultant said it was risking the farm on a horse that has been known to throw shoes but is fast. Nevertheless, it may be hard to resist the temptation of Oracle cost efficiencies, which are as much as 30 per cent lower than competitors’ with specific AI tasks.
The interests of Mark Zuckerberg in this saga can hardly be overestimated. Mocked as a metaverse Moonshot, the Meta CEO has since swung in the direction of AI as ChatGPT was unveiled in 2023. In July, he issued an all-hands memo stating AI to be the most important product direction in the company and diverted 20 per cent of the engineering resources towards it.
The Oracle deal is easily part of that blueprint as it allows Meta to scale up Llama 3.1, its most recent open-weight model, competing with GPT-4 to previously unknown heights. Think about Instagram feeds that are not primarily recommendations, but are generated in real time, or WhatsApp bots that are bargaining deals independently. The opportunities are also quite enticing, and the threats are also alluring: AI hallucinations, ethical issues, and the risk of losing a job in content moderation.
The AI initiative by Meta has already paid off. Its Ray-Ban smart glasses, announced at Connect 2024, now have the ability to translate and recognise objects in real-time using AI, and sell out in major markets. However, scaling such features requires exascale computing capability, and this can not be offered by in-house efforts only.
These pipelines have quietly become the favourite of AI data pipelines with Oracle and its Exadata Database Machine. According to the reports, pilot trials between the companies revealed that the inference tasks could be completed 40 per cent faster, which is sufficient to make the price tag eye-watering. To Zuckerberg, it is a calculated risk: In case it succeeds, Meta would become the champion of AI to the people, not due to closed ecosystems like Microsoft-OpenAI or Google.
The market rocked with the leak. On September 20, Meta shares rose 4.2 in after-hours trading, which gave the company a market valuation of an additional $35 billion and briefly dethroned Alphabet as the most valuable tech company in the world.
Oracle was not too far behind, shooting up 6.8 per cent to an all-time high, with analysts at Goldman Sachs raising their price target to $180, on rumours of follow-on acquisitions. Nvidia, the AI kingpin, fell 1.1% due to fears of diluted GPU demand and Microsoft, which is now a cloud partner of Meta, fell 2.3% due to rumours of their possible Azure departure.
The response by Wall Street highlights the precariousness of AI investing. It is not a partnership, but a lifeline, according to one of the hedge fund managers, citing the fact that Meta burned through 39 billion dollars of cash in Q2 alone. Bulls claim that the deal reduces the capex of Meta to provide cash for dividends or buybacks.
Bears respond that 20 billion dollars may go down the drain, referring to the 46 billion metaverse write-down at Meta in 2022. Extended measures split over: The Nasdaq was up 1.5% with semis such as AMD and Broadcom that might provide ancillary tech.
The news is heard all over the world. Regulators look at the deal in Europe as a red flag to compliance, as the GDPR regulates AI data usage. Asia chip foundries such as TSMC or Samsung are salivating over possible spillover orders. Even in crypto circles, trading is on the rise, and AI-based tokens such as FET and AGIX shot up 10% as a result of blockchain integrations speculated over on decentralised training.
The competitors are not sitting on their heels. Aware of this, Google Cloud declared a price adjustment that it calls zero-egress to AI developers by bypassing charges on data transfer to attract Meta holdouts. Offended by this, Microsoft made fun of an imminent Azure AI Foundry at Ignite preview, claiming smooth integrations with OpenAI.
The silent giant, Amazon Web Services, intensified the marketing of its Trainium2 chips, with an eye on startups that are conscious of their costs, looking at the open-source playbook of Meta.
In a veiled attack, during a TED talk, the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman, warned of the dangers of vendor lock-in during a mega-deal, citing his connections with Microsoft. Meanwhile, the new $6-billion-and-xAI, which are vying for similar deals, swarm with rumours of Cohere making inroads to the IBM side.
The net effect? A supplier war that is narrowing the margins but blowing out technology. One VC referred to it as the AI moment of OPEC, where the suppliers had the cards, but the demand was going out of control.
In the case of Oracle, revenge is sweet. The company has long been mocked as old school technology, but this has changed in the hands of Catz, with OCI nearly doubling every year. This Meta win might open the doors to Walmart and ExxonMobil-sized customers that will cement its third-place ranking between AWS and Azure.
However, the implementation is critical: To scale at 20 billion, it would require the construction of huge data centres, which would put pressure on supply chains already stretched by the conflict between the U.S. and China.
Enlarging the picture, this transaction makes AI hungry in terms of infrastructure. International data centre power requirements may double by 2028, according to IEA estimates, competing with that of Japan.
The slice alone of Meta may be consuming 10 gigawatts by the end of the decade, causing sustainability discussions. Zuckerberg is a supporter of efficient AI, whereas the critics lament the carbon footprint, calling on nuclear tie-ups, as in the case of Three Mile Island, revived by Microsoft.
The agreement is not without thorny issues in terms of ethics. AIs at Meta have been criticised as content-suggestion algorithms are biased, and the enterprise customers of Oracle have governments with mixed human rights histories.
Will this marriage enhance the risks of surveillance or create instruments of world benefit, such as climate modelling? Advocates of privacy, both within the EFF and in EU legislators, insist on transparency provisions in the footnote.
Employee consequences are also very big. Although the arrangement is expected to offer employment to cloud operation workers-Oracle eyes 5,000 hires- the looming threat of robotisation terrorises coders and creatives. The churn is emphasised by recent layoffs of 10 per cent of Reality Labs at Meta.
With the talks nearing the brink of collapse, perhaps at the end of October, the scan centres on obstacles. Terminal pricing, SLAs and IP safeguards are cockpit issues. A deal with Signature may be introduced at the Q4 Meta earnings, and pilots may be launched in Q1 2026. There are many legal wildcards available: EU investigation of cloud monopolies or the FTC in the U.S. examination of the entanglements of Big Tech.
In the long run, this solidifies an AI-giant future, demonopolizing Microsoft-OpenAI. It is a moonshot multiplier to Meta and a growth grenade to Oracle. According to Zuckerberg in one of his recent podcasts, AI is not coming; it is here, and we are all in.
When this $20 billion monster is exactly drying, it is clear that the tech giants are flipping their chips, and the artificial sentience race has just reached light speed. The victors will recreate reality; the slow movers will be debugging the previous day’s code.