With Amazon's AWS had major issues that slowed down the internet a couple of weeks ago, then last week it was Microsoft's Azure which was creaking. Officially there are denials that any kind of hacking was involved, be it by Russia, North Korea, or just plain thugs.
I am generally not inclined to be a big conspiracy theorist but on this one I am skeptical of the denials. With China routinely testing Taiwan with flyovers and other crap and Russia doing the same thing throughout Scandinavia, the Baltics, and even Denmark and Germany, we know they are trying to fuck with us wherever and whenever they can. My guess is that in one way or another we are being tested by somebody. Watch Google's cloud platform have similar issues next week.
Which brings us to an interesting point. Ian Bremmer advanced the thesis that the mega-tech companies need to be considered strategic actors themselves. Amazon's revenue is similar in scale to the GDP of a Poland or Sweden. Apple's is about the same size as Thailand's. The hyperscalers' data centers will become attractive bombing targets for our adversaries and will need to be defended. Eventually they will wish to have influence over defense strategies developed at the Pentagon etc. In some sense I get it, we will all depend on these data centers, to some extent we already do. It would make sense to prioritize their defense. But if our allies in Europe and Asia are being pressed to raise their defense spending, shouldn't we be doing the same for the hyperscalers? Should they not be paying more for the defense of their assets?
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