Downtime of major internet services could also cause deaths elsewhere, as more industries become reliant on cloud services.
I could imagine hospitals losing access to health records, emergency responders losing access to mapping or route planning software, people losing access to Uber and not being able to get to the hospital because the taxi companies have gone out of business.
Of course all this stuff is supposed to have clean failover, but not all of it has had its mettle tested.
Man. In times like these—the northwest falling into the ocean or whatever—it's unimaginable to think about the sheer amount of data loss that could occur. I'd probably be really worried about that loss of data or, worse, the loss of services if millions of people suddenly died.
I read the whole thing in gripping detail with Mt St Helens out my office window... I was imagining the horror of not being able to blog about my death as the Tsunami was approaching...
Then you'll realise the human impact was mentioned repeatedly in the article - population in the affected regions, elderly people, school children, estimated death counts by different organizations. That was one main focus of the article - how many people such an event would kill.
Why is it necessary to prefix/suffix a comment on the article, with an "of course, people will die and that's obviously bad, we don't want people to die, is this enough mentioning of the people dying that we can say something else without you passive aggressively implying I don't care about the people dying?"
Just seemed like horrific lack of perspective. The infrastructure supporting transient internet technologies is way way down the list of importance if the Cascadia Subduction Zone slips.
I grew up in Central Oregon which is surrounded by fresh (geologically speaking) lava fields. I wonder if the Native Americans that were around when Mt Mazama was turned into Crater Lake worried about the disruption of their Obsidian tool making business.
