Secretary Panetta. (Photo: flickr.com/usnavy)

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta took a little trip to the Intrepid Air and Space Museum, where he gave a speech. The New York Times reports that in that speech, he proceeded to do what appears to have been his damnedest to scare the ever-loving crap out of everyone, everywhere about the prospect of cyberattacks on our precious bodily fluids American infrastructure.

Painting a picture that sounds an awful lot like a Michael Bay film, Secretary Panetta warned: 

“An aggressor nation or extremist group could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches,” Mr. Panetta said. “They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.”

Mass chaos: It's not just for Deceptacons any more!

He also dropped the term "cyber-Pearl Harbor," because of course.

The New York Times also points out that Mr. Panetta is currently stumping for new legislation demanding new standards for things like power plants and gas pipelines. So, you know--grain of salt and all.

Artist's rendering. (Photo: gifmethegif.tumblr.com)

If you're less than observant, you might have missed a little announcement at the top of the Tumblr Dashboard, containing some "bittersweet news" from VP of engineering Blake Matheny.

Okay, you might want to sit down for this.

Are you sitting down?

Okay, while the Tumblr team has been hard at work scaling up to meet the scads of impressions per day, there's one final step left in the process. Just one! However, that one final step has an unfortunate side effect: 

all traffic to blogs and the Dashboard will be suspended during the operation — returning a simple “we’ll be right back” message.

We are preparing for any issues that may arise and want you to expect your blogs to be unavailable starting at 4:00am EDT this Saturday (Oct 6th), and to come back online slowly over the next few hours.

Mr. Matheny closes with the promise that this temporary outage will ensure that Tumblr remains shipshape in the years to come and the company's "deepest apologies for the inconvenience."