A major blackout was blamed on "induced atmospheric vibration" — is that a real thing?

There is a plausible route from real physics to that wording, which is worth laying out because it makes the phrase less mysterious.

Temperature genuinely does affect transmission lines. Conductors expand when hot, so spans sag more; sag changes clearance to whatever is below; and a line's current-carrying capacity depends on how well it sheds heat to the surrounding air. Large temperature swings therefore change what a line can carry and where it physically sits.

There is also a real mechanical phenomenon in which wind causes conductors to oscillate — galloping and aeolian vibration are the standard terms, and both are studied extensively because they damage hardware.

So you can imagine an explanation involving temperature, atmosphere and oscillating lines getting compressed into a phrase for a press conference, by somebody working from a summary rather than from an engineering report. That is speculation about the wording rather than about the event.

The phrase is not standard terminology and you will not find it in the literature. What sits underneath it, though, is real and has a proper name: power oscillations, and specifically inter-area oscillations.

A large synchronous grid is a set of rotating machines that must all stay in step at the same frequency. That system has natural modes of oscillation, in the same way a bridge or a guitar string does — groups of generators in one region can swing in phase against groups in another, typically at frequencies below one hertz.

Normally these modes are damped and die away. Under certain conditions — heavily loaded lines, particular generation patterns, low inertia — the damping can become weak or negative, and an oscillation grows instead of decaying. If it grows far enough, protection equipment disconnects lines, which changes the topology, which can cascade.

That is a well-documented failure mode and it has caused major blackouts historically. It is not exotic, and it is nothing to do with the atmosphere vibrating.

The broader point worth taking from this is that early official explanations of complex system failures are usually wrong or incomplete, and not because anyone is being dishonest.

A large grid disturbance produces an enormous amount of recorded data across many operators, and the sequence is reconstructed over weeks or months. Anything said within twenty-four hours is a hypothesis stated under pressure to say something.

The useful move is to wait for the formal incident report. Those are typically published, detailed, and far more informative than the initial statements — and they frequently contradict them. Treating the first explanation as provisional is the correct scepticism here, rather than assuming a phrase that does not appear in textbooks must be a cover-up.

One thing that makes modern grids more susceptible to the oscillation problem, and it is a genuine engineering discussion rather than a controversy: inertia.

Large rotating generators store kinetic energy in their spinning mass, which naturally resists sudden frequency changes. Inverter-connected sources do not have that mass, and a grid with less of it responds faster to disturbances — which cuts both ways, since fast response can also be used to damp oscillations deliberately.

Managing this is an active field, with synthetic inertia and fast frequency response as the main tools. It is one of the more interesting engineering problems of the moment and it is much more specific than anything the phrase in your question conveys.