The US political instability we have all been watching almost made it to the data center industry recently. According to reports, a 28-year old man from Texas was arrested on Thursday while trying to purchase explosives he planned to use to blow up an Amazon AWS data center in Ashburn, Virginia.
The man, who apparently also took part in the storming of the Capitol building in January, is said to have thought that he could take down much of the internet and especially the parts used by the FBI, DOJ, and other agencies he has a problem with. I try hard to stay out of politics on this site, but it’s getting harder and harder. But at least the alleged plot was never going to work anyway.
Amazon and its hyperscale brethren have been building triversity and quadversity into their infrastructure for a reason. And the physical security in place for such facilities these days is not really something a lone wolf with a rifle and some C-4 is going to penetrate. I’m not sure that a terrorist strike on a data center was tops on their list, but I’ll bet it was somewhere on that list.
That being said, you have to wonder how deep this mistrust of technology runs within this guys circles. Home-grown threats to infrastructure could easily find easier targets if they got organized and actually thought about how to accomplish this guy’s goals.
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