Internet Outages Could Spread as Temperatures Rise. Here's What Big Tech Is Doing

Our changing climate threatens the very services we rely on to keep our businesses online and stay connected with friends and family. As our world warms up, power outages and water shortages have ravaged many parts of the planet. Data centers may be among the first to feel the resource pinch. They need lots of energy to keep their servers powered, air conditioning and often water to cool the servers, sensors to monitor equipment, fire suppression, and backup systems to absorb energy hiccups or software malfunctions -- complex yet resilient data ecosystems. That takes a lot of energy, leading data centers and data transmission networks to be responsible for around 1% of energy demand worldwide, according to the latest report from the International Energy Agency. For data centers, building redundancy in backup systems and power generators ensures that things can go wrong without the whole center shutting down. Using networks of data centers, like with AWS or Microsoft Azure, redundancy makes sure client data is synchronized so that their website or service isn't disrupted if a data center goes down. Both Amazon and Microsoft have so-called availability zones -- a system such that if one zone goes down in one area, services are supported by other connected zones, which are far enough away not to be affected by the same natural disaster.  While Amazon, Microsoft, and Google account for half of the biggest "hyperscale" data centers in the world, their sustainability priorities are still critical for the other half as they set the example.