Have remote access to some PCs in west coast cities listed. Not seeing any outages among these. Doesn't appear to be a total cutoff, likely some particular carriers or services (happens to include something needed for 911, I expect that's a side-effect.)
Does appear to be a significant event, but can't confirm that the sky fell down.
Here's an idea …
Let's suppose the white hats wanted to trigger a lot of localized tactical blackouts, or cut communications in certain locations. In the middle of the night. Let's say there was some kind of Plan and this needed to happen.
Now, what happens if the night leads off with a big bright fireworks electrical display lighting up the sky in the nation's biggest city? Something totally spectacular that gets on the news nationwide?
Well … if everyone knows that something electrical just blew up (and the videos drive that point home!) then maybe everyone will be a little calmer about blackouts and communications issues. Even on the opposite coast. Because electrical stuff blew up, and circuits aren't working for big sparky reason.
There's a ready made explanation to make other outages and communications failures feel really natural tonight, nothing to be alarmed about.
So … perhaps one of the reasons for what happened in NYC was that it served as a memetic blue sparking decoy explanation that keeps people calm about other parts of the Plan that happen later in the night?
The spaceweather.com homepage updated
They don't sound super-excited, at least in the aurora forecast: "Arctic sky watchers should be alert for auroras after nightfall." But passing along the data for reference, since this is a good website for solar storm info.
That's good, thanks for scrolling down and picking that up. I hadn't gone down that far today. The section below is also a good datapoint to pass along, the Kp numbers as shown on their site. Adding that here.