That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a different long term effect right? If all the actual computers are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but they're not gone.

But how many people and companies actually have full functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How many people and companies have devices that are locked to remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all that was literally gone, a few thousand missiles or drones and data centers are all just completely erased including tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy, except with this huge societal exocortex gone.

The bigger problem is that a war is likely to hit multiple levels of infrastructure at the same time. So the datacenters will come under attack, but so will the fiber cables, and the switching apparatuses, and the power plants, and likely also the humans who maintain it all. High-availability software is usually designed for 1-2 components to fail at once and then to transparently route around them. If large chunks of the infrastructure all disappear at once, you can end up in some very weird cascading failure situations.

That's a big assumption. Often there's no time to do things right, or no money, or lack of oversight, and so on.

Not every company is staffed by empowered and highly motivated staff

That doesn't help much in a shooting war, unfortunately.

Redundancy is great for uncorrelated outages - if a freak weather event or power problem knocks out data centres in London, and your backups in Paris and Frankfurt are unaffected.

But if there's a war and London is getting bombed? Good chance Paris and Frankfurt are also getting bombed.

(Perpetrators also not caught)

Electrical Transformer Manufacturing Is Throttling the Electrified Future - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604887 - April 2026

Send two drones to firebomb the roof of the datacenter. Wouldn't trigger any fire suppression system that I am aware of.

The gear to replace the power infra is more readily available than the thousands and thousands of miles of wire and fiber in a datacenter, plus all the equipment, batteries, inverter/chargers, maybe some diesel generators, etc.

If you want to do economic damage, you hit the datacenter.

If you want to turn the people of the country against you and mobilize them, then you hit the power infra.

So you mean to say, one doesn't even need drones, a datacenter could be (temporarily) taken out with a handgun?

Large parts of our society are built on trust, and there is societal ignorance of how vulnerable our infrastructure is.

Criminals generally aren't that sophisticated or intelligent, so they aren't aware they can target these places.