Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE)

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.

> we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely

this would require human intervention and I am a bit worried what if the strike can happen again and human lives might be lost.

IIRC there have been cases in history where sometimes a same location is targeted across multiple days. Obviously, AWS might have local employees working in the region but would there be an evaluation of this threat itself within the relevant team in AWS. What if they try to bring the service back but then missiles are struck again and what if human lives might be lost on it. Let's just hope that it could be part of a evaluation as well.

I actually like the way they said it. I don't know if it's a different cultural tradition, but the cool steely-eyed fact-based conversation always really felt so much more inspiring:

    Conrad: I got three fuel cell lights, an AC bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, AC bus overload 1 and 2, Main Bus A and B out.

    Aaron: Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux.

Modern culture in the movies and whatnot is that someone should be yelling "Everything's failing. Give me something, Houston. All lights are on! MAYDAY MAYDAY!" and some sort of flavour commentary like that. But reading engineering updates that go like this feels like watching maximal professionalism under fire:

> At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally. Customers who were running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event. EC2 Instance launches will continue to be impaired in the impacted AZ. We recommend that customers continue to retry any failed API requests. If immediate recovery of an affected resource (EC2 Instance, EBS Volume, RDS DB Instance, etc.) is required, we recommend restoring from your most recent backup, by launching replacement resources in one of the unaffected zones, or an alternate AWS Region. We will provide an update by 12:30 PM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.

This has that same mechanical tone of an ice-cold captain dealing with a proximate situation providing exactly the information they know. No flavour commentary. Amazing. I fucking love it.

Found this relevant article: https://serverlift.com/blog/military-modular-data-centers/ (AWS Military Modular Data centers)

I do think that though, atleast from the Anthropic decision prior, we know that Anthropic which was used by DoD should be on normal AWS datacenters.

I am saying this because, Dod Threatened to force take the source code of Anthropic if they don't agree to aggregious demands so that means that they don't have the source code.

Perhaps DoD used Anthropic within AWS Military modular DC's but I find it extremely unlikely.

I am almost certain that even with OpenAI who bent its knee to DoD, its still hosted on regular infrastructure and DoD is using these AI models on pretty sensitive tasks (During the Venezeula Maduro's capture, Anthropic/Claude were used iirc to handle some data analysis)

IMO Tho, Any Employee from Anthropic/OpenAI might know better tho about how these models are deployed.