Meteors vs. Data Centers - Cloud Computing: Worst Case Scenarios

The October 2025 AWS outage in us-east-1 was a 15-hour preview of life without the cloud. When a DNS resolution failure cascaded through DynamoDB, it didn't just take down websites – it disrupted daily life in unexpected ways. From Starbucks' mobile ordering to smart mattresses stuck at the wrong temperature, the outage revealed how deeply cloud infrastructure has woven itself into the fabric of modern existence. As David Heinemeier Hansson noted, this centralization "is just an insult to DARPA's design" of a resilient, distributed internet.

But what if a software bug doesn't cause the next regional failure, but by a half-megaton explosion in the sky? The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor – which injured 1,500 people and damaged 7,200 buildings with its 500-kiloton airburst – offers a sobering case study. This 20-meter asteroid approached Earth undetected and exploded with the force of 25-30 Hiroshima bombs. The mathematical risk analysis reveals an uncomfortable truth: while the odds of such an event hitting Reston or San Jose specifically are about 1 in 160,000-235,000 over 20 years, when you consider the top 100 data center hubs globally, the risk climbs to roughly 1 in 3,100-4,700.

The episode examines what would happen if a Chelyabinsk-scale event struck "Data Center Alley" in Northern Virginia, home to AWS us-east-1 and Azure US East, and the densest concentration of data centers on Earth. Beyond broken windows and power outages, such an event would simultaneously affect multiple availability zones—the exact scenario that multi-AZ architecture cannot handle. As the podcast emphasizes: "multi-AZ ≠ multi-region."

Drawing from historical precedent (including the 1908 Tunguska event that flattened 2,150 square kilometers of forest) and personal experiences with early warning signs, the episode argues for embracing "productive paranoia" in infrastructure planning. The key insight: while we can't prevent cosmic events, we can control our preparedness through geographic distribution, rigorous backup procedures, and – critically – ensuring our human teams are as geographically distributed as our data.

Links

Main segment

• Chelyabinsk meteor — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
• Tunguska event — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
• Brown et al., Nature (2013) – Chelyabinsk airburst analysis: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12741
• Popova et al., Science (2013) – Damage and injury patterns: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1242642
• NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO): https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/
• Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at JPL: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/
• Sentry: Earth Impact Monitoring System: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/
• NASA NEO Surveyor Mission: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/neo-surveyor
• DART Mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test): https://www.nasa.gov/dart
• AWS Service Health Dashboard: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
• DHH on Cloud Centralization (37signals): https://world.hey.com/dhh
• Lex Fridman Podcast #474 — DHH transcript: https://lexfridman.com/dhh-david-heinemeier-hansson-transcript/
• ThousandEyes — "AWS Outage Analysis: October 20, 2025": https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/aws-outage-analysis-october-20-2025
• UN-Habitat (2020) – World Cities Report: https://unhabitat.org/World-Cities-Report-2020

News

• Physics Today – Chelyabinsk ground track analysis: https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.5.0285/full/
• New Yorker — "A Meteor in the Russian Sky": https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-meteor-in-the-russian-sky
• Reuters — "Amazon says AWS cloud service back to normal after outage disrupts businesses worldwide": https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-reports-outage-several-websites-down-2025-10-20/
• The Guardian — "Amazon reveals cause of AWS outage that took everything from banks to smart beds offline": https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/24/amazon-reveals-cause-of-aws-outage