Microsoft hints at bit bunkers for war zones

Microsoft is reevaluating how it designs and builds datacenters in conflict-prone regions after Iran began targeting Middle Eastern bit barns in retaliation for US military operations. These attacks "will have some influence over time on the design and construction of datacenters and it may not be the same everywhere," the …

[Lee D]

Not much good if all their lines to the Internet are taken out.

Rather than build in those regions, makes far more sense to have connectivity elsewhere.

[tater]

Think about what you are saying. A internet connection can be repaired in days. Vs years for a data center.

[Roland6]

Definitely need to think about what you are saying. Basically, a “datacentre” composed of dynamically connected servers distributed in people’s backrooms, is going to be much more resilient than a single huge bit barn. Ie. The move to cloud computing and its associated concentration of IT in large scale bit barns is going to be less resilient than old school on-prem deployments in the event of wars, natural disasters or acts of god.

[Anonymous Coward]

We are back to the Ye Olde Days of Mainframes with Cloud, except they serve far more people now.

Unless they already do, Amazon should probably allocate 1/3 of each DC (distribution centre) for DC (data-centre) activities. That should allow redundancy.

The internet hints they had over 1,300 active facilities at the start of 2025.

[Ken G]

I'd leave the internet connection alone

and target the cooling.

[BBRush]

LOAC1

Strong rules already exist about the targeting of civilian infrastructure in wars (Law of Armed Conflict), but these are routinely ignored by countries that do not accept them or just do not care what they where the drones end up (insert your own list of countries here).

MS might be better to try and push all countries to accept that a) civilian infrastructure should never be targeted and b) civilian infrastructure should never be used by the military (this making it a legitimate target), but good luck with that.

Of course, they could also threaten to withold services from combatants that target their DCs, but the removal of Teams might be a price some people are willing to pay.

[Guy de Loimbard]

Re: LOAC1

Totally.

The rules already exist, but, as you've already pointed out, the application of said rules varies by conflict, country and perceived necessity of outcome

Also, rules are no good without enforcement and potentially repercussions that persuade one to follow them for fear of the consequences.

YMMV on most of this, but no one is following the Law of Armed Conflict explicitly anymore as far as I can see.

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: LOAC1

” Also, rules are no good without enforcement”

Who is the nutjob going to enforce rules to people with bombs ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LOAC1

The International Criminal Court.

Cells for Trump, Hegseth, Netanyahu await ….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Radovan_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

[Jellied Eel]

Re: LOAC1

The International Criminal Court.

Cells for Trump, Hegseth, Netanyahu await ….

The US doesn't recognise the ICC, otherwise MS would already be jailed for crimes against humanity. Israel doesn't recognise it either, but then Bibi's bombings are just delaying his own fraud trial in Israeli courts. But it'll probably be some "Fall Guys R Us".. err.. negotiation and blame delegation. So Trump may blame Israel, which he can until Trump is asked by the US to explain just what he meant by "a whole civilisation will die tonight", which most lawyers & non-lawyers can readily interpret as a theat to committ genocide, which is a tad illegal, even under US law.

Much will probably depend on the US mid-term results giving the Democrats enough votes to do anything. Which is by no means certain given Democrat infighting between those like Schumer, who are trying to create a more moderate DNC, and the 'progressive' Dems who want to drag the party further to the left.. But then DEI is why the Dems lost the last election. Or there's an outside chance that maybe Vance will take a run at the King. I strongly suspect there's a bus rapidly approaching for Hegseth, because he's an obvious fall-guy. Biggest problem is the Iran conflict was a long time coming, promoted by the US neocons on both sides of the house.

[Lee D]

Re: LOAC1

A rule without enforcement is worthless and only hinders those who obey it, and doesn't hinder those who disobey it.

Something very, very, very relevant to the US politician situation at the moment.

Either enforce rules, or don't bother to have them.

And if we were actually enforcing rules, the US would never be a part of the UN, NATO or any other organisation either. And there might be a few less people in Guantanamo - imprisoned in a foreign country because their imprisonment would be 100% illegal in the actual jurisdiction they were "tried" under.

[Roland6]

Re: LOAC1

Wouldn’t call them “strong”. The definition permits the Israeli’s to consistency target schools, hospitals etc. and claim they were being used as a military command posts (*) etc., Also some of the excuses being used by the Americans for their targeting of bridges etc. in Iran, where basically if a military vehicle or train carrying military equipment could use it, it was classified as a legitimate target…

(*) A military command post only really needs to have an officer, a comm’s guy and a foot soldier or two ie. The occupants of a single vehicle doing a tour of a building and thus operating a mobile command post that is only temporarily in a specific location.

[rg287]

Re: LOAC1

MS might be better to try and push all countries to accept that a) civilian infrastructure should never be targeted and b) civilian infrastructure should never be used by the military (this making it a legitimate target), but good luck with that.

It doesn't even need to be all countries really. They can start with their own country. If the US were to accept that civilian infrastructure is off limits, and then imposed that same restriction on states like Israel (as a condition of sponsoring them with all those sweet munitions), then that fix the 80th percentile of issues.

But they won't.

Obviously in this particular case, Iran have been lobbing drones and missiles into surrounding areas, but as an extreme "chaos-monkey" response to the US and Israel bombing civilian infrastructure, schools, and threatening to "wipe a civilisation off the map"... so y'know, maybe lead by example.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LOAC1

Enforce Copilot use for those who fail to comply!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LOAC1

You don’t need bombs or C4 ….. just some Navy Seal’s or SAS with cans of expanding foam filler for HVAC chill plants and their fan units. This will disable them for the good of humanity.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: LOAC1

the removal of Teams might be a price some people are willing to pay

Might be a desired outcome, let's not encourage them shall we?

[Pascal Monett]

"El Reg reached out"

No.

This is El Reg. You do not use bullshit bingo terms.

I know that El Reg is now owned by US fucking A, but we have standards here. You owe your readership to respect those standards.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "El Reg reached out"

and hugged the MS spokesperson warmly by the throat?

[jn5250]

Bit barns

If I were to prioritize civilian infrastructure to be protected against war crimes, computer centers would be way down on the list:

Hospitals, schools, power plants, bridges, resideltial areas, water supply, ....., bit barns.

The best method is to make the warring parties stop the f**k up bombing these things.

Anyway, what does "..some influence over time.." and "..may not be the same.." tell me? Do MS consider bunkers, decentralized structures or moving away altogether?

Next step will be that Musk needs a private armed space division to protect all his new space computers.

[Jon 37]

Re: Bit barns

"some influence over time" means that they are not going to immediately tear down their existing data centers and replace them with hardened ones. But as they build new ones, they may consider the risk of war and do something to make their new data centers harder.

They probably don't know what they will do, but some options include: Designing the data center to survive a nearby explosion (but not a direct hit), so the blast and shrapnel don't destroy the building. Putting equipment that would normally be outside, into a building that can protect it. Having more physical distance between parts of a data center, so that a single direct hit doesn't take out the whole thing. Perhaps a bunker for staff to use during an attack.

Designing a data center to survive a deliberate direct hit without damage is not really possible. The right weapon will defeat any passive armour.

The exact things they do will depend on a bunch of factors: how likely a war is, how much space they have available for mitigations, the cost of mitigations, any planning rules, etc.

[Ken G]

Re: Bit barns

That's you as a person but if you were the corporate entity Microsoft and asked Copilot what to prioritise you might come back with a different answer.

[Taliesinawen]

Redundancy and reliability in the face of kinetic threats

A peer-to-peer system would provide resilience against kinetic attacks and regional failures, unlike centralized cloud providers that concentrate infrastructure in vulnerable data centers.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Burying your server etc deep down…

but like Space Monkey's orbital data centres, neglects the practical issue of cooling leaving aside power supply and other equally practical issues

Subterranean data centres still need to conduct heat to the surface to exchange with environment since rock and vacuum of space are both piss poor conductors of heat.

An adversary just targets the surface cooling infrastructure to disable the data centre.Your basic heat seeking missile has the nose for the job.

The only advantage of burying the servers etc is that they could survive the conflict and once the cooling is sorted, be restarted.

Strikes me that any adversary of the West; particularly the Anglosphere; and specifically the US, would assiduously avoid damaging Microsoft infrastructure in order that the unarguable benefits of O365, Crapilot, Teams etc etc continue to be enjoyed by their enemies.

«Quand l'ennemi fait un faux mouvement , il faut se garder de l'interrompre.»

One might have foolishly believed that after the shit show of the 20th century that everyone had understood that investing in peace is the option that pays the highest dividends - reliably, repeatedly and renewably; a bit like solar energy etc but I forget that these loonies are also waging a war against those, not that the two are unrelated.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Burying your server etc deep down…

That "surface cooling infrastructure" could be a lake, though, and lakes are pretty hard to destroy with bombs, unless they owe their existence to a dam at one end.

[Rjan]

The purpose of not targeting civilians is to avoid provoking irregular conflict, or making it more difficult to ceasefire a regular conflict, by killing, horrifying, or radically dislocating civilians.

Large militaries learned the hard way in the 20th century that there are huge reserves of military capability amongst the civilian population that is usually unmobilised (and difficult for the home side military to mobilise, provided the civilians are not attacked), and also that the motivation of the soldiery is supercharged by death or damage to their own families and neighbourhoods when this is seen as unfair or unprovoked.

Basic food, water, and shelter contribute to sustaining civilian life, and urban areas might require some basic modern infrastructure like water and sewage pumps.

But there's no way in the world a computer centre is ever going to be regarded as essential civilian infrastructure.

[druck]

The new Slough

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slop!

It isn't fit for humans now,

There isn't grass to graze a cow.

Swarm over, Death!.

...

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slop

To get it ready for the plough.

The cabbages are coming now;

The earth exhales.

[cyberdemon]

Re: The new Slough

Ironically, Slough has rather a lot of datacentres (e.g. https://datacentremagazine.com/news/yondrs-hattrick-in-london-532m-abs-for-data-centre-campus) so you don't necessarily need to alter the poem

[ZaphodHarkonnen]

If MS is directly supplying services to militaries, then the locations they provide that service from can become a valid military target.

Yes, strikes on those can have impacts on civilians, but just because a service or location is used by civilians is not some magic protective dome.

For a company the size of MS, surely they would understand that they're viewed at the same level as nation state actors for a lot of things.

[Jellied Eel]

For a company the size of MS, surely they would understand that they're viewed at the same level as nation state actors for a lot of things.

MS routinely attacks innocent civilians with weaonised updates that destroy PCs. It even has a Copilot to conduct hostile espionage operations against supposedly allied nations. It constantly degrades performance and productivity with weapons such as Teams, and wages war against civilian IT staff. It is responsible for billions in economic damages and should be considered a WMD.

(It may also be the case that MS is getting into kinetic data weaponry & destruction by quietly installing HD launchers in their datacentres. They don't really need 1GW to run compute, but they do to launch drives at 4,000m/s+ from the railguns and storage silos that we've allowed to encircle our capital cities.)

[VoiceOfTruth]

The narrative needs to be fixed

This is not the 'Iran war'. This is 'America's latest war'. The USA is still smarting that Iran kicked it out decades ago. This is just the latest in a long line of America's wars against countries that do not want to be under it's boot.

[iguana_soft]

More of the same

A lot of countries like the UAE, India and the EU require their companies data and voice over IP communications to be in region - even if in the end it can easily be spied on because the data centre owner is an US company.

This shows Brad has a lot of time on his hands. MS and AWS are perfectly capable of self destroying their cloud regularly as the Reg regularly reports. If they cared about availability they'd work on that first, instead it's firing people and see how far they can run down the enshitification road before collapse.

[herman]

Unprovoked

El Reg's idea of 'unprovoked' leaves much to be explained. Who has been yelling Death to America and Death to Israel and attacking and killing for decades? Shame on you sissy Limeys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Unprovoked

History. Learn it.

I am no fan of the theocrats in Tehran, but it certainly is understandable that the Iranian people, at large, would have a hatred of the US and UK after they overthrew their democratic government and supported a brutal dictator for decades.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Unprovoked

Who has been yelling Death to America and Death to Israel and attacking and killing for decades?

Hmm.. I know! The US and Israel? It's strange the way history repeats itself with the US propping up Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his brutal regime that massacred many Iranians. Which then lead to a spot of regime change. Successfully that time. Well, for the Iranians. But it's even gone as far as re-using much the same imagery, eg-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw#/media/File:Eagle_Claw_wrecks_at_Desert_One.png

Wrecked C-130 and helicopters. The 'Epic Furry' version lost more aircraft, but that's progress I guess. But kinda why the US & Iran don't exactly get along, and probably never will.

[rmullen0]

They will make them hardened because the know people don't want them

There may be a time when people need to remove them. The Epstein class think they can do whatever they want regardless of what the public thinks.