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On Thursday, Amazon Web Services said that one of its major data centers in north Virginia was overheating so much that it had to be shut down. <\/p>\n
According to The Next Web<\/a>, AWS engineers were forced to throttle their services and then reroute customer traffic to other facilities, affecting customers like the crypto platform Coinbase<\/a>, which experienced an \u201cextended outage of core trading services.\u201d<\/p>\n Things hadn\u2019t improved by Friday morning, and Amazon refused to give an estimate as to when the issue would be resolved. \u201cWe are actively working to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected hardware in the impacted zone,\u201d AWS said in an update<\/a>.<\/p>\n Though the issue was said to have been resolved by 11:30am on Friday, an \u201congoing issue\u201d in the company\u2019s north Virginia region was still causing timeouts on some AWS services more than an hour later.<\/p>\n As Daniel Mewton, an energy infrastructure expert and partner at the legal firm Slaughter and May told Reuters<\/a> in a 2025 interview, full data center outages are \u201cextremely uncommon,\u201d and issues with data center cooling systems are \u201ceven rarer.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cYou need to be up more than 99.99 percent of the time sometimes,\u201d Metwon told the press agency.<\/p>\n That said, the outage is particularly ironic given the tremendous carbon footprint associated with data centers like it, many more of which are currently sprouting up to fuel the AI boom.<\/p>\n Data centers already account for 0.5 percent<\/a> of the world\u2019s carbon emissions. As one team of Cornell researchers found<\/a>, at the current rate of AI growth, data centers will put out anywhere from 24 to 44 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by 2030 (roughly equivalent to adding 5 to 10 million cars to US roadways.) One controversial study even found that they\u2019re associated with higher temperatures for miles in their vicinity<\/a>. <\/p>\n Unless you\u2019ve been living under a rock, you\u2019re probably aware that this kind of pollution is aleading driver<\/a> of global warming. That catch-22 is hard to overstate: data centers are shutting down because they\u2019re overheating, as the energy required to keep them running superheats the entire planet around them.<\/p>\n