Would the cloud survive a US Civil war?

Question

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?

omosubi · Accepted Answer

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.

vegasje · Answer

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.

gregjor · Answer

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.

jklein11 · Answer

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.

vanusa · Answer

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.

tamaharbor · Answer

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.

ttyprintk · Answer

For a right-wing movement to gain critical mass, they&rsquo;ll depend on a lot of those services. The signal would be, I think, a right-wing takeover of the services they need.