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Ask HN: Would the cloud survive a US Civil war?

6 points by throwaway6532 ↗ HN
I'm not from the US, and the question isn't intended to spark any kind of flamewar, but I'm simply trying to game out a scenario of what might happen and HN is the only community with enough insider knowledge to give a reasonable answer on this.

So I was wondering, say there were a civil war in the US sometime in the future (I certainly hope not, but just entertain the hypothetical), what would the impact be on cloud computing and what flow on effects might that have on the global economy?

The reason this keeps me up at night lately is when AWS sneezes the whole internet catches a cold. Aren't there some global services hosted out of US-EAST-1? Developers can work remotely, so that's fine, but what if there was enough civil unrest that the people who maintain the physical infrastructure couldn't perform the upkeep necessary to keep that particular datacenter online?

Am I imagining things or is there a possible systemic risk of a months long outage of AWS under such circumstances that would grind large portions of global commerce to a halt?

Or am I just paranoid?

19 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] thread
jklein11
This is one clearly American opinion but if there was a credible threat to the current political system of United States of America, be it an internal threat or external threat, there would be global consequences.
omosubi
I have been thinking about this a lot and though I'm not at all an expert it seems like people just assume the internet will always be accesible and exist forever no matter what happens to human civilization, which is obviously not the case. There are thousands of companies that make the thing work as effectively as it does and as we are seeing with the labor shortage, relatively small shocks impact the company in big ways.

I doubt the cloud would be _that affected in the case of a US civil war but I could see it if there was an economic collapse on the scale of the great depression. I think a us civil war is rather unlikely and people will sort themselves into red states/blue states with potential succession long before there is widespread violence. Economic collapse seems far more likely and would be much more damaging.

throwaway6532
Any particular angle on how such a collapse might come about?

The biggest threats I see are the debt problems in the Chinese property sector explode causing their "commercial paper" market to set off a chain reaction causing global contagion due to China being nearly everyone's number one trading partner. Or the US has an internal conflict and that majorly affects things (which is what I'm considering in this question). The other is simply demographics spell the writing on the wall that populations will continue to shrink and shrink and I would imagine it potentially gets to a point where the amount of infrastructure we've built the modern world on top of wouldn't have sufficient human capital to keep it running below a certain critical threshold of population size, but that one is a bit longer off.

gregjor
All of those scenarios would create much more urgent and immediate problems than losing access to Twitter or Jira. Banking, for example. Food, energy, transportation would all suffer, globally.

The Chinese economy and internal US conflicts are out of your control, so they merit as much worry as an asteroid strike. We’re suffering through a global pandemic now and the internet has so far survived. If demographics worry you get busy having children.

vegasje
It sounds to me like you have tied your life so closely to tech that you are unable to see the forest through the trees. If some kind of civil/global event occurs that takes out AWS, then you can bet that public works across the country would be in the same, if not worse, shape. There is no sector that would be untouched by civil war. We are at the same time both well distributed and irrationally continental.
throwaway6532
Well, I don't live in the US, so I'm well insulated from any disruption that would happen on the ground, but I'm a software engineer, so naturally my income is tied to tech much of which domestically and internationally relies on cloud providers being operational. What I'm worried about is the potential for global contagion.

I can't help but think that despite all the redundancy and resilience built into the cloud through multiple AZs and globally distributed regional datacenters it was all architected on the assumption that it would be physically safe and that there lurks a failure mode somewhere where a particular SPOF exists that renders the rest of all that redundancy useless.

gregjor
Then you should worry less about unlikely things you can’t control, like civil war in the US, and worry more about why whatever country you live in doesn’t have redundant cloud services that could work if the US got shut down.
gaws
> What I'm worried about is the potential for global contagion.

A lot of stable internet architecture is based in the United States. If anything happens, there will be rippling effects worldwide. You won't be immune.

ttyprintk
For a right-wing movement to gain critical mass, they’ll depend on a lot of those services. The signal would be, I think, a right-wing takeover of the services they need.
vanusa
Prices will rise of course, as they will for just about everything across the board. But basically the elites will always find a way to keep their core services running. That you can count on.
throwaway6532
I was considering possibly private hiring of armed security forces to enable those facilities to continue to operate could be one response from said elites...
gregjor
You can safely assume the cloud data centers are already secure and guarded.
tamaharbor
If there is a civil war in the US (will the media call it Civil War II or Civil War 2?), absence of the cloud will be the least of our problems.
throwaway6532
For those inside the US yes, but I'm considering about the impacts to those of us who live outside the US.

Edit: the media may opt to call it Civil War 2.0 as another option.

gaws
The Second Civil War
gregjor
Look at the vast size of the US, and the multiple geographical barriers in the way of an 1860s type civil war. There is no modern equivalent of the Confederacy. Even tens of thousands of angry armed people would be either too geographically dispersed to cause too much trouble, or concentrated in a few places making them easy for the military to put down. Despite what you might see on the news the US is not on the verge of civil war.

Widespread civil unrest and violence, maybe, but unlikely that would turn into a continent-wide war or even last very long. Even during the last actual civil war commerce in the North went on more or less normally.

If you’re losing sleep over this find a local hosting service and stop worrying about AWS getting taken down by rebels.

throwaway6532
A civil war would look more like The Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 90s than 1860s type conflict.
gregjor
Area of Northern Island: 5,456 square miles. Area of United States: 3.8 million square miles. Vast differences in population, ethnic and religious diversity, and the fact that the United States successfully expelled the British in the late 1700s. Whatever problems the US has today they are not based on religious differences or ongoing colonialism. Nor can internal rebels focus their energies on a couple of cities within a small nation.