I wonder exactly how much of the internet would evaporate instantly if you detonated a high-altitude nuclear weapon over the bay area?
I'm not saying it'd be a good idea to destroy silicon valley in a flash of nuclear fire, but just EMPing the area would take out a frightening amount of servers all at once.
I mean, Amazon would keep a lot of stuff online because you wouldn't be hitting their Seattle or east coast datacenters.
And Google would remain online because they build out network centers like they're specifically trying to survive ww3
Maybe that's their longterm plan?
Like those trees that poison the soil so they don't have to compete with weeds and stuff, because they're big enough to survive the poison, and a couple dandelions aren't.
Google is going to build network centers in every city and then ignite ww3, knowing they can survive it, but Yahoo and Bing can't.
Android is going to win the smartphone war because Google has fallout shelters in every area code and Cupertino got leveled by a dozen direct hits like it's Cheyenne Mountain.
Anyway as for servers in the bay area: while I've seen a lot of stuff move out of the bay, it is still very common for companies to have their main backend here. They'll have webservers and such elsewhere, but then all the batch processes and primary databases are still located here, because that's where their techs are.
So probably what you'd see if the bay got EMP'd is that a lot of sites would still be up, but would quickly break as overnight batch processes and backend databases weren't working anymore
Like, ebay: you could probably still browse the listings, but I bet making new auctions wouldn't work anymore because it's trying to make an RPC call into a server that's lost all its magic smoke
And before you think this is impossible, consider that the overall cost of the Manhattan project was about 34 billion (in 2023 dollars), and Google's annual revenue is around 300 billion.
Starting a minor nuclear war is just good business sense at this point.
@flyingsaceur and especially if it was a real war and not just an emp'ing: how many of the people who know how to restore from off-site backups just got vaporized?
@foone@flyingsaceur when they ask me why I don't wanna relocate to where the rest of the devs live, I'm gonna tell them that I'm the team's designated survivor
@foone i remember a comment at srecon a couple of years ago. "We've taken a job that can be done from anywhere with an internet connection. And concentrated it ten square miles. In an earthquake zone "
@foone most of the major players have geography distributed data centers so not much would happen for a few months. Though the loss of people to keep things running catch up
@swetland that's where my VPSes are!
My roommate's polycule Minecraft server will be instantly destroyed, backups and all, if Google starts the Net War!
@larsmb well obviously. You can't work in the bay area tech scene for a decade without having some Opinions about if it'd be a good thing for this whole area to get suddenly evaporated
@foone Most BigCorps have data centers that are geographically-diversified to avoid localized disasters like this. Even without the risk of EMP of a nuclear weapon, Silicon Valley is prone to experience earthquakes.
Now, smaller companies that self-host may not be as sophisticated, and their single-location server may be wiped out. One would hope that they have backups in a different region, but who knows?
@foone Is that really true anymore? Do any of the big public clouds have significant server farms in the Bay at this point? (Maybe they still have SPOF C&C for their physically-elsewhere server farms?)
@luis_in_brief@foone If we're focusing on "the Internet" at large, even without public clouds, an EMP would cause massive permanent damage to the local servers hosting source code, power grid and all connecting power control systems, and Internet switches in the area.
Given the high cost of "lift-and-shift" efforts that tend to move mostly long-term data storage off to cold La La Land, I agree that I'm curious how much is left vulnerable and without remote backups within the Bay Area itself.
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