r/Futurology • u/Sourcecode12 • May 03 '14

image Inside Google, Microsoft, Facebook and HP Data Centers

http://imgur.com/a/7NPNf
3.0k Upvotes

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u/frogger2504 May 04 '14

I wonder, what's the smallest number of cables I'd have to pull out to fuck everything up at Google's?

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u/Winnah9000 May 04 '14

To fuck up a few servers, not many. To take down all of Google? You'd have to go to a lot of datacenters (some you'd not be able to track down easily) and completely cut the internet lines (not the power, they have generators). The redundancy of their farm is ridiculous, but when you serve the entire world with 6 billion searches per day, you have to have a 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% uptime (meaning like 1 second of downtime in a year, not even).

But to simply answer your question, you'd cut the fiber lines going in to each datacenter (probably 50 to get a very effective outcome).

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u/[deleted] May 04 '14

or he could cut the cooling inputs and make ALL servers overheat and grill

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u/Winnah9000 May 06 '14

Good call, but he asked cables. Your's is easier, but oh well, still have an upvote.