Remember that strange story from earlier this month about French supermarkets getting hit by a cyberattack that caused their refrigeration systems to go haywire, resulting in mountains of food going bad and even causing some of the units to catch fire?
Well, we're now learning that something alarmingly similar happened at several U.S. military bases back in August, and the Pentagon is investigating whether hackers were behind it.
Here's what happened.
According to news that's circulating Thursday, freezers in at least six military commissaries on bases across the country malfunctioned and ruined the food supplies in them. At one particular base, the freezers mysteriously switched into defrost mode overnight, heating up their contents instead of keeping them frozen.
Military investigators are now treating these incidents as suspected cyberattacks.
Pentagon treating military base freezer malfunctions as suspected cyberattack: officials https://t.co/Vxi3wI3TZA https://t.co/sQDS6F39Q3
— New York Post (@nypost) October 29, 2026
The Pentagon confirmed that the U.S. Cyber Command is involved in the investigation and is "working in close coordination with interagency and law enforcement partners."
The Army Criminal Investigation Division's Cyber Field Office is reportedly also looking into the incidents.
One of those bases affected was Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where officials explained in an August 26 Facebook post that a freezer had gone into defrost mode and heated up everything inside.
"Trust us when we say it was 'spoiled,'" the base wrote.
The investigation has now become an international effort with officials from the U.S. military now working with French law enforcement to get a better understanding of the grocery store attacks.
Investigators haven't yet established whether the two incidents are connected, and there's no confirmation yet that the American freezer failures were caused by hackers.
The whole thing does, however, raise some pretty uncomfortable questions about the security of systems we might not typically think of as being vulnerable to cyberattacks.