Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario.

Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack

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xoa 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter

That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.

But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.

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nostrademons 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens.

The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.

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michaelt 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers.

That doesn't help much in a shooting war, unfortunately.

Redundancy is great for uncorrelated outages - if a freak weather event or power problem knocks out data centres in London, and your backups in Paris and Frankfurt are unaffected.

But if there's a war and London is getting bombed? Good chance Paris and Frankfurt are also getting bombed.

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electronsoup 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> worth their salt

That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.

Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff

	▲	quantified 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To the parent poster's point.

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kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Higher tier data centers can run for extended periods of time on backup generators, and some indefinitely if roads allow for diesel delivery.

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UncleOxidant 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Both seem like easy targets. Hitting the datacenters themselves could results in more permanent damage.

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stygiansonic 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

(Perpetrators also not caught)

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hdjdjdbsbsbh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You forgot the diesel generators within the DCs

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toomuchtodo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Transformers are also manufacturing constrained.

Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026