In Irony-Soaked Incident, Amazon Data Center Shuts Down Due to High Temperatures

Amazon Web Services had to throttle and reroute traffic from a major data center in northern Virginia last Thursday because the facility was literally overheating. Customers including Coinbase suffered extended outages of core trading services, and by Friday morning the company still could not say when the problem would be fixed.

AWS told users it was “actively working to bring additional cooling system capacity online” to recover the remaining hardware. Even after the company claimed resolution at 11:30 a.m. Friday, timeouts persisted in the region more than an hour later. The episode is especially uncomfortable because full data-center outages are, in the words of energy infrastructure expert Daniel Mewton of Slaughter and May, “extremely uncommon,” while cooling-system failures are “even rarer.”

Mewton noted the industry standard: “You need to be up more than 99.99 percent of the time sometimes.” Yet the very infrastructure built to power the artificial-intelligence surge is proving unable to keep itself cool. Data centers already produce 0.5 percent of global carbon emissions. Cornell researchers project that, at current AI growth rates, those facilities will emit between 24 and 44 million metric tons of CO₂ by 2030, the equivalent of putting 5 to 10 million more cars on American roads.