No, next week will not bring a global electric blackout. What is scheduled for Tuesday, November 17, 2026, is a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System in the United States, run by FEMA and the FCC, and officials say the alert is not a real-world outage.
The timing matters because the rumor has already spread far beyond a routine government drill. Google Trends recorded more than a 1,000% jump in searches for “el apagón mundial,” showing how quickly a planned communications test was turned online into a supposed worldwide catastrophe.
The test is set for 2:20 p.m. ET and will send messages in English and Spanish through radio and television stations across the country. FEMA said it will go only through those channels, not to mobile phones, which directly answers one of the biggest false claims circulating on social media: that millions of people would lose electricity and communications at the same time.
That claim has no official basis. No authority in the United States or México has issued any alert saying a national blackout is coming, and in México there is no official announcement linking FEMA and the FCC to such an event. The confusion has been fed by a coincidence with a season 35 episode of Los Simpson, “It’s a Beautiful Life,” in which Lisa narrates a future Thanksgiving scene in her diary and the date shown is November 17, the same date attached to the real test.
Social posts took that match and stretched it into a larger story, but the facts do not support it. The EAS is a mass-notification mechanism used by federal authorities in crises, and periodic tests are standard procedures meant to keep it working. That is why FEMA and the FCC have also set December 3, 2026, as an alternate date if the November drill does not happen.
The sharper question now is not whether the world will go dark, but how far the rumor can travel before the test goes out on radio and television as planned. From April 2026, CFE had already warned about false news circulating on websites and social networks, and this latest wave shows how a routine alert-system exercise can become a global scare in a matter of hours.
