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CISA, the FBI, and international partners issued “Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers,” directing providers to deliver immediate, actionable, accurate, transparent, and continuously updated communications during IT and operational-technology outages. The guidance applies to disruptions caused by cyberattacks, human error, equipment failures, and natural hazards, and calls for clear separation of confirmed facts from uncertainties while balancing legal, operational-security, law-enforcement, and containment requirements.
The agencies warned that outages can cascade through interconnected critical infrastructure, causing broad public disruption and uncertainty. Organizations are advised to establish crisis-communications plans, tailor updates to affected audiences, and maintain backup communication channels in case telecommunications systems are unreliable. The guidance was informed in part by Cloudflare’s nearly six-hour November 2025 outage, while industry observers cautioned that voluntary recommendations will require executive commitment and external accountability to overcome legal- and public-relations-driven disclosure practices.
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CISA, the FBI, and international partners issued "Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers," guidance for crisis communications during IT and OT outages. The guidance emphasizes timely, accurate, transparent and actionable updates, including backup communications planning and coordination with legal, operational-security, containment, and law-enforcement needs.
A Cloudflare outage disrupted services for almost six hours. Cloudflare acknowledged the incident, apologized to users, provided updates, and said it intended to publish a detailed postmortem.
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CISA officials warned that a military confrontation with a peer adversary such as **Russia or China** would likely bring successful cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure, causing severe disruptions across **water, power, healthcare, law enforcement, and parts of banking**. Agency leaders said operators should expect to lose reliable internet access, third-party and vendor connections, and some **SCADA** functionality, and should plan to continue delivering essential services in a degraded state rather than relying solely on traditional cyber hygiene measures. To support that shift, CISA is prioritizing operational resilience through its **CI Fortify** initiative, redirecting OT resources to conduct **75 to 100 assessments** over the next year and expand emergency planning guidance across sectors. Officials called for "ruthless prioritization" during crises, including decisions on which facilities receive limited water or power, while the EPA is preparing a national cybersecurity exercise for the water sector to test operations without supervisory control and data acquisition technology; CISA also warned that prolonged cyber-induced outages could erode public trust more sharply than natural disaster recovery delays.
Jun 29, 2026
CISA, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the FBI, and other international partners released **CI Fortify – Advice for isolating vital systems**, a joint guidance package aimed at helping critical infrastructure operators keep essential services running during cyberattacks and major disruptions. The guidance tells organizations to identify minimum vital operational technology and supporting systems, map dependencies and network connections, and establish physical or logical isolation points so critical functions can be separated from corporate, internet-facing, and other less-trusted environments when needed. The agencies said operators should build and regularly test graduated isolation plans, with a preference for **physical isolation** where feasible, and prepare to sustain operations manually until reconnection is safe. The guidance was issued against a backdrop of persistent threats from state-backed and criminal actors, including activity previously linked to **Volt Typhoon** and **Salt Typhoon**, and warns that isolation itself creates risks such as reduced patching, lower external visibility, and increased exposure from removable media that must be addressed in advance.
Sep 2, 2026
A virtual briefing hosted by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) argued that **telecom networks’ “crown jewels”**—including signaling pathways and subscriber identity/metadata—remain high-value targets, and that traditional perimeter defenses are insufficient against advanced adversaries. The session cited activity associated with China-linked threat actors **Salt Typhoon** and **Volt Typhoon** as illustrative of systemic telecom weaknesses, and promoted *privacy-first mobile-carrier* design choices (e.g., minimizing exposed identifiers and reducing the long-term value of compromised data) as concrete controls to reduce attack surface and limit blast radius. Separately, the U.K. **National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)**, working with **CISA**, the **FBI**, and other international partners, released guidance titled **“Secure Connectivity Principles for Operational Technology”** aimed at reducing exposed and insecure connectivity in OT environments, including nuclear-sector contexts. The guidance outlines **eight foundational principles** intended to help organizations protect OT networks from highly capable and opportunistic actors, including **nation-state** threats, against a backdrop of accelerating IT/OT convergence and increasing rates of OT/ICS-impacting incidents reported across critical infrastructure.
Jul 12, 2026