If you go down the route of conspiracy theory you have to also believe that the companies who have already issued a PR response are lying and that all of the employees privy to the truth are also staying silent.

That would be quite a story.

I agree, Snowden was a pretty big story exposing the tech companies for working with the NSA in the PRISM program after previously denying it, including Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Amazing. It's 2019, and you still don't understand what PRISM is. Hint: at no place in the system diagram does it show any NSA system interacting with any of those tech companies' systems.

The iPhone and the atomic bomb were kept secret quite well.

I don’t think there has been a case of an atomic bomb engineer leaving a prototype at a bar, though.

How would we know? Information (esp. sensitive ) was a lot easier to hide back then.

Also the iPhone leaked was an iterative-model not the original.

I think we know because an atomic bomb prototype would have been far too large and conspicuous for an individual to take to, let alone leave at, a bar :)

Not to mention the bar would’ve been in Los Alamos, a town run by the military.

Also there were rumors of the iPhone for yeeeeaaaars. I remember people jokingly referring to it as "the jesus phone" while speculating about it.

There were rumors of the iPhone for a couple of years before it was released.

Even funnier, there were quite accurate rumors based on patents of the “true video iPod” since 2003 - a 3.5 inch all touch screen iPod. The rumor sites correctly predicted the iPod Touch down to the resolution years before it was released. They didn’t know that would also be the form factor of the iPhone.

One company keeping a specific product launch secret is different from three or four independent companies and all of their network engineers all conspiring.

Sure, but the Manhattan project was a huge undertaking with multiple extremely large facilities.

What if the NSA identified a critical backdoor and ordered all major companies to decommission and not talk about it? ( NSLs )

Fair enough... But then they all just did a really crappy job of concealing the patch?

Note I said decommission, not patch. And aren't most of the outages of this period routing related?

Why would you assume it to be so malicious, if true?

Maybe they were under attack. Maybe they were just removing all of the Bloomberg rice grain chips! :)

There's an infinite number of "maybe"s though. Far more than there are truths.

Your own bias about the entities shapes your conspiracy theory.

From the public, yes. From other nations, no.

Let’s not forget the existence of ayyyy lmao.

If the US is attacking Iran via cyberwar, it'd be likely they would want to retaliate. Google's post about fiber cables being cut, seems like a good experiment to see potential impact of our US network. Many companies rely on backbone lines to transfer petabytes of data between data centers around the country, these are our weakest points.