The Secret Service announced on Tuesday that it had discovered and dismantled a huge and imminent threat to the telecommunications network in New York City, just as the latest United Nations General Assembly session got underway there.

More than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards were taken off line across multiple sites within 35 miles of the UN General Assembly. It wasn't certain whether the UN was a target of the network.

The network had been used to The network was used to threaten senior U.S. government officials and could have also disabled cell phone towers, launched denial of service attacks, and provided anonymous, encrypted communications between perpetrators and criminal organizations.

Analysis done so far shows communications between known threat actors and other individuals known to local law enforcement.

A warning

“The potential for disruption to our country’s telecommunications posed by this network of devices cannot be overstated,” Secret Service Director Sean Curran said in a statement. “The U.S. Secret Service’s protective mission is all about prevention, and this investigation makes it clear to potential bad actors that imminent threats to our protectees will be immediately investigated, tracked down and dismantled.”

The investigation had been going on for months before the network was dismantled and will continue for some time longer.

The threat was concentrated around New York City, but covered the entire tri-state area, which includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut that are in close proximity to the city.

Along with the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Securit, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the NYPD were involved, along with other law enforcement partners.

"Bad escalator," "bad teleprompter" and "chemistry"

The ongoing investigation hopes to reveal whether the network had specific targets or was put in place to carry out future attacks that had not yet been identified, as well as to hide communications of threat actors from detection by authorities.

The first day of the UN session was not great for President Donald Trump, who was going up the escalator in the UN building with First Lady Melania Trump when it suddenly stopped.

Later, his teleprompter stopped in the middle of his speech.

“These are the two things I got from the United Nations,” Trump said. “A bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”

Republicans may be investigating whether these breakdowns happened on purpose to make Trump look bad.

Trump did say that a "chance 39-second" meeting with Brazil's president had "chemistry" and was a good sign that tensions between the two countries could ease when they meet next week.