Yippee ki-yay! We're All Living in a Bad 'Die Hard' Movie Today.

Bruce WIllis and Justin Long in ‘Live Free or Die Hard’ (Everett)

Today, computer glitches have temporarily grounded United Airlines, halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange, and taken down the Wall Street Journal website. What is happening in the world? There may be a simple explanation: We’re living in a Die Hard plot. Two journalists on Twitter, Paper Magazine’s Eric Thurm and The Washington Examiner’s Dave Brown, have pointed out that today’s events mirror the cyber-terrorist plot of 2007’s Live Free or Die Hard.

In the fourth Die Hard film, a group of computer hackers (led by Timothy Olymphant and Maggie Q) attempt to simultaneously take control of the U.S. transportation grid, financial systems, public utilities, and communications. Good-guy hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) describes the takeover to NYPD detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) as a “fire sale.”

“It’s a three-step systematic attack on the entire national infrastructure,” he explains to McClane. “Okay, step one: take out all the transportation. Step two: the financial base and telecoms. Step three: You get rid of all the utilities. Gas, water, electric, nuclear. Pretty much anything that’s run by computers, which today is almost everything. So that’s why they call it a fire sale, because everything must go.”

The term #firesale is now trending on Twitter. Reassuringly, the New York Stock Exchange has put out a statement saying that the shutdown “is an internal technical issue” and not the result of a cyber attack. Still, we hope the FBI has John McClane on speed dial. And that somebody is keeping an eye on Nakatomi Plaza.

Watch a scene from ‘Live Free or Die Hard:’