Hackers will wipe the banks and switch off the internet for three months: who started the November 17 scare

A rumor claiming that on 17 November 2026 hackers will break into the biggest banks, zero out accounts and shut down the internet worldwide for three months is unconfirmed: it comes with no technical details and no named group. In the rumor’s version, a «super-powerful AI» fixes the vulnerabilities in the meantime, and then comes «COVID 2.0». The author never explains what that means.

The first post was written by an X user going by Wesley, in Portuguese. He cited an unnamed source on the dark web and admitted himself that the information was unconfirmed. On the evening of 2 November Russian-language Telegram channels, including Exploit, picked the story up, and then it spread to Threads. Calls to stock up on food, water, cash, gold and silver were added along the way.

The date matches a real event. On 17 November at 2:20 p.m. Eastern time (10:20 p.m. in Moscow) FEMA and the FCC will run a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS). It was announced on 16 September. The message, marked as a test, goes to radio, TV, cable, satellite and wireline video providers. It will not reach phones, and the test does not involve the internet. The backup date is 3 December.

The rumor then picked up more coincidences. A screenshot from The Simpsons episode «It’s a Blunderful Life» (2023), where Springfield loses power, was passed off as a blackout prediction, though the episode names no date and no 2026 event. Factcheck.kz journalist Daniil Bystrov says ordinary government 72-hour preparedness guides in the UK and Japan also fed the panic: they were presented as preparation for a catastrophe. Another coincidence: GTA 6 is released on 19 November, two days after the «date».

The internet is made up of many independent networks and has no single off switch, as Internet Society and NIST describe it. Banks keep backups, so one hack cannot wipe their data. Real outages are local: KRAKOBIT wrote about how Sevastopol internet dropped after drone strikes on the power grid and how La Palma lost internet after storms knocked out power. Long shutdowns are done by states inside their own borders: in 2026 Iran kept its international internet off from January to May, about four months, while only the domestic national network worked. Before that, Iran cut the network in November 2019 (about a week) and in June 2025.

Source: SecurityMedia