Millions of people were left without power January 8 as several wildfires raged across the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Widespread power outages in Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties were impacting more than 4 million customers, according to the California Office of Emergency Services.

Colonial Pipeline restarted its main gasoline artery, which delivers fuel from the U.S. Gulf Coast to East Coast markets, on January 17 after it was shut earlier in the week due to a leak in Paulding County, Georgia. Market disruptions from the outage were minimal, although supply had tightened in some areas, U.S. fuel distributor Mansfield told clients.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is indefinitely restricting helicopter flights near Washington Reagan National Airport after a deadly collision between an American Airlines regional jet and Army Black Hawk killed 67 people. An FAA official said the restrictions impact Route 1 and Route 4 near the airport. A National Transportation Safety Board member said it appears the helicopter at the time of the collision was transiting from Route 1 to Route 4.

The U.S. embassy in Mexico has warned people to avoid traveling to certain parts of the U.S.-Mexico border because of "increasingly frequent gun battles" and the discovery of "improvised explosive devices (IEDs)." The warning was issued on January 27, covering Reynosa, Rio Bravo, Valle Hermoso, and San Fernando and Tamaulipas. "Criminal groups target public and private passenger buses, as well as private automobiles traveling through Tamaulipas, often taking passengers and demanding ransom payments," the U.S. Department of State's travel advisory said.

In the wake of reports that a lack of water supply may have negatively impacted the work of firefighters battling the multiple blazes in Los Angeles, California Governor Gavin Newsom called for an investigation on January 10. “The ongoing reports of the loss of water pressure to some local fire hydrants during the fires and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir are deeply troubling to me and to the community,” Newsom wrote in the letter addressed to the CEO of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the L.A. County Public Works Director.

The widespread water crisis that engulfed the Richmond metro area in early January was completely avoidable and never should have happened, according to a Notice of Alleged Violation issued to the City of Richmond by the Virginia Department of Health (VDH), a warning which also states the city may have broken state law. VDH Office of Drinking Water staff said they were not informed about the critical situation at Richmond’s water treatment plant on Douglasdale Road, which was the epicenter of the crisis, until more than 7 hours after the plant suffered a catastrophic system failure.

On January 9, the Eaton Fire in Los Angeles County threatened Mount Wilson, which houses the transmitting towers of nearly every Los Angeles TV station, many of its FM radio stations, and other critical communications facilities in Southern California. At one point, the fire advanced quickly to the bottom of some structures, and it appeared that the broadcast compounds would be sheared by quick-moving flames. However, a fire suppressant was dumped from a tanker, quickly knocking down the flames and reducing the immediate danger.

The Justice Department announced the coordinated seizure of 39 domains and their associated servers in an international disruption of a Pakistan-based network of online marketplaces selling hacking and fraud-enabling tools operated by a group known as Saim Raza (also known as HeartSender). The seizures were conducted in coordination with the Dutch National Police.

TD Bank said on January 23 Chief Global Anti-Money Laundering Officer Herbert Mazariegos is stepping down immediately, as the bank takes remediation actions after it was fined by U.S. regulators for compliance failures. TD faces an asset cap and a $3-billion penalty by U.S. regulators following a probe by U.S. agencies into the lender's anti-money laundering program that resulted in a rare quarterly loss and forced it to suspend its forecast. The lender ran into problems with U.S. regulators for failures in its risk and compliance program that provided ground for a host of illicit activity, from fentanyl and narcotics trafficking to terrorist financing.

One of the largest mortgage lenders in the Southeast U.S. said it suffered a cybersecurity incident in December that exposed troves of customer information. Tennessee-based Mortgage Investors Group (MIG) did not outline how many customers were impacted by the attack but said they have hired a vendor to identify the affected individuals. MIG warned that those affected likely had their full names and financial information exposed during the cyberattack.

The United States is going to ban Russian and Chinese software in vehicles, according to the Department of Commerce, due to national security concerns. The final rule, posted on the federal register January 14, comes after the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security previewed the rule months ago. The Bureau of Industry and Security found that certain technologies originating from China or Russia present an undue and unacceptable risk to U.S. national security. The software bans will apply to Model 2027 cars, while the hardware bans will apply to Model 2030 vehicles.

American Honda has recalled nearly 295,000 Honda and Accura car models due to an issue with the fuel injection electronic control unit (FI-ECU) software. "American Honda self-diagnosed this issue by monitoring telematics information and determined the need to perform the software update of the supplier part,” the company stated in a January 29 press release.