This scenario isn't as far fetched as people think. I was running a global deployment in 2012 when hurricane Sandy hit the east cost. The entire eastern seaboard went offline and was off for several days. Some data centers were down for weeks. Our plan had covered that contingency and we failed all of our US traffic to the two west coast regions of amazon. Our downtime on the east cost was around two minutes. Yet a sister company had only one data center in downtown New York, and they were offline for weeks, scrambling to get a backup loaded and online.
I worked for a regional company in the oil and gas industry and the HQ and both datacenters were in the same earthquake zone. A twice per century earthquake had a real risk of taking down both DCs and the HQ. The plan would have been for every gas station in the vertical to switch to a contingency plan distributing critical emergency supplies and selling non-essential supplies using off-grid procedures.
