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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

Instead of targeting data center itself, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future wartime scenario.

Most data centers have a dedicated electrical substation that powers it, so it's possible to target the data center without affecting anywhere else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack

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>Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter

That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.

But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.

Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers. Many cloud engineers are not worth their salt, but working in Big Tech, this has been table stakes for 20+ years. There are regular disaster drills, both scheduled and unscheduled, that test what happens when a datacenter disappears. Ideally everything transparently fails over, and most of the time, this is what happens.

The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.

> Any cloud engineer worth their salt is going to have their programs be stateless and their data replicated across multiple data centers.

That doesn't help much in a shooting war, unfortunately.

Redundancy is great for uncorrelated outages - if a freak weather event or power problem knocks out data centres in London, and your backups in Paris and Frankfurt are unaffected.

But if there's a war and London is getting bombed? Good chance Paris and Frankfurt are also getting bombed.

Especially given modern weaponry. "Cheap" missiles and drones have a range that covers the better part of a continent.

> worth their salt

That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.

Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff

To the parent poster's point.

It's not, unless you think part of the definition of "worth their salt" is never working for a company with bad resource allocation. And I don't see why it would be.

Transformers are also manufacturing constrained.

Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026

Higher tier data centers can run for extended periods of time on backup generators, and some indefinitely if roads allow for diesel delivery.

Not necessarily. Many backup generators can only run for whatever the insurance estimators have calculated is the time required to restore the grid connection and that's it. For example one common means of generating backup power is marine diesels, which are readily available. These use the ocean for cooling. If you're using them to power a data center you need to provide cooling water to run them, and when you've run through that they shut down. That's just one example, but in general you can't run backup generators indefinitely.

> where someone fired bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day power outage.

So you mean to say, one doesn't even need drones, a datacenter could be (temporarily) taken out with a handgun?

This is the same sinking realization people had after 9/11 when thinking about infrastructure. Just damaging one or two substations serving the downtown core of a major city could cause massive economic damage.

Yes, though with a rifle (higher stopping power than a handgun).

Large parts of our society are built on trust, and there is societal ignorance of how vulnerable our infrastructure is.

Criminals generally aren't that sophisticated or intelligent, so they aren't aware they can target these places.

(Perpetrators also not caught)

>1:45 a.m. – The first bank of transformers, riddled with bullet holes and having leaked 52,000 US gallons (200,000 L; 43,000 imp gal) of oil, overheated...

Both seem like easy targets. Hitting the datacenters themselves could results in more permanent damage.

No, taking out the transformers, which can have lead times of three to five years, will result in the most long-term damage. You can't just pull one out of storage and drop it into place.

Ukraine has proven otherwise. A lot of European countries pulled them out of storage and gave to Ukraine. Of course there will be a limit to this if you destroy enough of them.

Europe scraped together some transformers they'd been holding in reserve as spares and hoped they wouldn't need them themselves at some point, but once they were gone, they were gone. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-transfor...

How about use drone submarines to cut optic fibre undersea cables?

It’s far more difficult to replace a data center than to replace transformers. Ukraine’s electricity grid has been under attack for years and manages to replace and rebuild transformers and restore power within hours.

That wasn't thought to be due to a foreign actor though, more likely it was domestic terrorism. Why would the effect on a rural local power station ever be a good measure of a wartime scenario at all?

You forgot the diesel generators within the DCs

Right. The diesel generator radiators are also susceptible to the same attack. A few bullets to each radiator would cause a coolant leak, and eventually they'd run out of coolant, overheat, and shut off.

Not enough damage.

Send two drones to firebomb the roof of the datacenter. Wouldn't trigger any fire suppression system that I am aware of.

hitting the electrical grid is a war crime, not so much an AWS server farm. optics / progressive escalation does matter

You're barking up the wrong tree.

The gear to replace the power infra is more readily available than the thousands and thousands of miles of wire and fiber in a datacenter, plus all the equipment, batteries, inverter/chargers, maybe some diesel generators, etc.

If you want to do economic damage, you hit the datacenter.

If you want to turn the people of the country against you and mobilize them, then you hit the power infra.

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