Interesting adjacent theory is how much are datacenters becoming military target to strike as part of disrupting initial defenses. It doesn't seem it was the case in this instance, but I could see this becoming a more important target in future.

Seems like it should be somewhat easier to bomb 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

Again, this is just me thinking out loud on a tangent and this doesn't have much to do with this story, but I felt it was an interesting thought to share nonetheless.

The more interesting question, is how many datacenters are just plonked next to a high-value military target?

For infrastructure reasons, we plonk datacenters down next to airports big enough to fly major hardware into, and near where the big oceanic cables come ashore… and for strategic reasons those are also the perfect places to place military bases

Data centers in space no longer look so unreasonable when the requirement is “redundancy against multi site bomb strikes mid op”. A little depressing when some pieces start to fit together.

> Seems like it should be somewhat easier to nuke 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

Previous outage news makes it sound like the cloud providers still have quite a few logical single points of failure.

Exactly. 2 is only sufficient for HA against random failures. It's not enough for HA against a determined adversary willing to use targeted force.

That's so interesting. Are any of the US military (or other satellite state of the US) systems running in "normal" datacenters or do they have a few protected DoD datacenters in the US?

> Seems like it should be somewhat easier to nuke 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.

The bigger part of me seems that if we someone nukes 50 datacenters all at once or say all of Amazon's datacenters at once, then the data stored in there would simply be gone and given so many datacenters are located in Virginia,USA iirc or just so many companies being reliant on few datacenter providers.

The larger threat to me with the lose of data is firstly the panic within public fronting services but also, with Hedge Funds, Pension funds or banking datacenters who might be using these and if they lose the data, then its gonna cause even more public mayhem.

Some might be saying oh off-site backups exist but there has atleast been one instance, where a single Google accident had led to massive issues for a 135 Billion $ pension fund.

Relevant Kevin Faang video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GOAUyipnM4 [Google Accidentally Deletes $135 Billion Pension Fund, Chaos Ensues]

IIUC part of the reason ballistic missiles have multiple warheads is that some of them detonate high up to knock out air defenses and other electronics allowing the rest to fall through to their targets. The last time we tried this experiment as a species was the starfish prime tests in 1962 which caused some electrical havoc in Hawaii. These days our systems are probably more delicate and sensitive? All that is to say, in a scenario where nukes are going off I'm not sure you'd even need to target any datacenters in particular.. they're probably all toast by default.

This is the data center version of https://xkcd.com/538/. Realistically if there is a hot war what you’re saying seems accurate.