You can live without Netflix much longer than you can without a flushing toilet, is the point I'm making. Yet we don't have armed guards patrolling the sewageworks... It's a matter of priority how finite security personnel are deployed.
"Yet we don't have armed guards patrolling the sewageworks"
There's probably a moderate amount of unseen security in larger areas surrounding water/sewage plants.
Also, we've dealt with regional natural disasters before. Drought, fire, flooding, etc - we have experience mobilizing resources and redistributing as needed.
We've never dealt with an extended outage of one or more AWS data centers for days at a time. How many govt/university systems would be unable to function because of direct or indirect dependencies on AWS-related services?
S3 going down for, let's say 4 days, would cause big havoc on so many projects and systems I know of.
I'm pretty sure most people have no clue how much of their data and systems functionality is reliant on AWS-related services.
Water outages happen often enough - they distribute water manually with tanker trucks. When sewage is overwhelmed it overflows into a river and they tell people to not go for a swim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitary_sewer_overflow
That still ranks lower than "sewage treatment gone". Maslow's pyramid still applies.
The sewage plant hits both physiological needs and safety needs (it's a pretty dire health threat quickly). AWS has weak tendrils to financial safety, but mostly affects layers above that.
Receiving your paycheck could be worse. There are ways to deal with water outages. Worst case you let sewers overflow into rivers, as discussed in another comment. If salaries of large companies remain unpaid this would be far more severe for a lot of people.
And, I think even more than we can imagine. It's one thing to count the number of services that are direct customers/dependents of AWS, and we really don't know how deep that goes.
But, add to that the non-AWS based services that directly or indirectly rely on AWS-based services.
I used to work at a company that had a large cage in a local data center - one of the other cages in the same room was apparently for the local police force (we weren't supposed to know this!).
It wouldn't surprise me if those police systems have moved, or are moving, to Azure or AWS data centers.
Police would probably still work fine without data centers for a few days. As long as they can communicate and 911 works, they can do most of their job in the short run.
It's much worse if benefits or paychecks don't get paid. For many people that means that they won't be able to buy groceries as soon as a few days later. Not the standard HN crowd, but many people depend on regular paychecks and can be in trouble if it comes even one day late.
Funny thing with the police, in the 60s there was flooding and they couldn't coordinate a response, so radio amateurs had to step in and provide comms. Those enthusiasts are still around under the codename RAYNET. The police eventually got their act together and invested in a system called TETRA which is self-contained and independent of any other infrastructure so they would never be caught with their pants down again.
Now they've ditched TETRA to save money and they just run over the 4G network like anyone else...
But if you attack a massive sewage treatment plant and completely disable it, you can effect maybe... 10 million people, if we're being generous?
If you hit AWS, just Netflix alone is going to effect 100 million people. There are definitely a few payroll providers that are going to have some reliance, so people all over are going to stop receiving their paycheques. Many businesses will be temporarily disabled.
On a national level we've got a lot more eggs concentrated in the AWS baskets than we do the sewage treatment baskets.
