Fridge off, impossible to charge your phone… This is what could have happened to you if the rumor of a possible global outage this Saturday, September 24 was plausible. In this case, there is nothing.

There won’t be a widespread shutdown, as various conspiratorial accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Tiktok have claimed, nor a “big reboot.” It is a “fake news”, note the observers of France 24.

The “black out” or large-scale power cut is a frequent conspiratorial hypothesis in conspiratorial spheres in this environment. What has fueled this theory this time around is the social media slip of a German MP, Friedrich Merz, during a speech on September 12.

Internet users relied on a video where the member of the Christian Democratic Union addresses the Bundestag, the German parliament. He says: “September 24, 2022 will all be remembered as a day that we will later say, ‘I remember exactly where I was.’

However, he wanted to mention only the date of entry into conflict between Russia and Ukraine. He also explicitly refers to the geopolitical situation between these two countries in the rest of his speech, which has been abbreviated on the web to allow another interpretation.

Indeed, the deputy continues: “when I heard the first news of the war in Ukraine and saw the first images of it”.

Questioned by Les Observateurs de France 24,Hero Warrings, the spokesperson for the parliamentary group of the MP concerned explained: “Mr. Merz meant February 24 and mistakenly said September 24. So it was unintentional.”

The Bundesta has rectified the error on its official website so as not to encourage this false rumour.