America’s largest water utility hit by cyberattack at time of rising threats against U.S. infrastructure
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American Water, the largest water utility in the U.S., disclosed that it had been hit by a cyberattack.
The Camden, New Jersey-based company said in a security statement on its website that it had learned of “unauthorized activity in our computer networks and systems” last Thursday, which it determined “to be the result of a cybersecurity incident.”
The company said on Tuesday that it shut down its customer service portal, and as a result, its billing function “until further notice” and will not charge any late fees or other fees related to billing as long as the system is down.
Some recent hacks of major U.S. companies have brought key online systems to a halt and created chaos for consumers and businesses, such as the hack of UnitedHealth which led to nationwide difficulty among patients needs prescriptions filled and health-care professionals needing to be paid for services.
Hacks targeting U.S. water infrastructure, in particular, have been increasing, with some of the attacks linked to geopolitical rivals of the U.S., including Iran, Russia and China.
Taking out critical national infrastructure has become a top priority for foreign-linked cybercriminals. “All drinking water and wastewater systems are at risk — large and small, urban and rural,” an EPA spokesman recently told CNBC.
American Water provides drinking water and wastewater services to more than 14 million people with regulated operations in 14 states and on 18 military installations.
One recent Russian-linked hack in January of a water filtration plant in a small Texas town, Muleshoe was located near a U.S. Air Force base. “Water is among the least mature in terms of security,” Adam Isles, head of cybersecurity practice for Chertoff Group, recently told CNBC.
The FBI warned Congress in February that Chinese hackers had penetrated deeply into United States’ cyber infrastructure in an attempt to cause damage, targeting water treatment plans, the electrical grid, transportation systems and other critical infrastructure.
America Water said it remains early in the investigation and “currently believes” that no water or wastewater facilities or operations have been impacted and water remains safe to drink.
Law enforcement and third-party cybersecurity experts are now involved, the company said.
American Water did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment.
The rising cybercrime wave targeting key water infrastructure led the Environmental Protection Agency to issue an enforcement alert warning that 70% of water systems it inspected do not fully comply with requirements in the Safe Drinking Water Act. Without quantifying an exact number, the EPA said some have “alarming cybersecurity vulnerabilities” — default passwords that have not been updated, vulnerable single login setups and former employees who retained systems access.
American Water said it first learned of the unauthorized computer access on October 3, and was subsequently able to determine it was a cyberattack. It said turning off customer systems was intended to protect data, though it added that it is too soon to know whether any customer information is at risk.
An American Water spokesman declined to comment beyond the official security statement.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.
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OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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