Dominic Mazoch posted:Or an EMP at the right place. Say where those supercomputers are!
An EMP of the scale required would wipe out so much modern infrastructure the cloud farms would be the least of it, it would fry the power grids, it would wipe out most of the cars and trucks on the road (modern trucks and buses rely on computers, too), many appliances would fail, the bank teller networks and atm's would be toast. The thing about the cloud is that it doesn't run in some data center somewhere, it runs across data centers located all over, it isn't centralized all in one place, if an EMP wiped out a particular data center the applications can be restarted in another, if I understand cloud architecture correctly, it has a level of redundancy in it traditional data centers don't really have (I am just speculating, but I suspect with cloud architecture, which I am not an expert on, they could implement what used to be called fault tolerance, have applications running in multiple farms that run the cloud and if one goes down, it simply keeps processing out of the other ones); if it is a widespread EMP, like some sort of "EMP" bombs detonated in the atmosphere, it would wipe out a lot more than just cloud computing.
