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.
According to The Next Web, AWS engineers were forced to throttle their services and then reroute customer traffic to other facilities, affecting customers like the crypto platform Coinbase, which experienced an “extended outage of core trading services.”
Things hadn’t improved by Friday morning, and Amazon refused to give an estimate as to when the issue would be resolved. “We are actively working to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected hardware in the impacted zone,” AWS said in an update.
Though the issue was said to have been resolved by 11:30am on Friday, an “ongoing issue” in the company’s north Virginia region was still causing timeouts on some AWS services more than an hour later.
As Daniel Mewton, an energy infrastructure expert and partner at the legal firm Slaughter and May told Reuters in a 2025 interview, full data center outages are “extremely uncommon,” and issues with data center cooling systems are “even rarer.”
“You need to be up more than 99.99 percent of the time sometimes,” Metwon told the press agency.
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.
Data centers already account for 0.5 percent of the world’s carbon emissions. As one team of Cornell researchers found, 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’re associated with higher temperatures for miles in their vicinity.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that this kind of pollution is aleading driver of global warming. That catch-22 is hard to overstate: data centers are shutting down because they’re overheating, as the energy required to keep them running superheats the entire planet around them.
More on data centers: Tech Companies Are Using Insidious Tactics to Build Data Centers on Indigenous Lands, Activists Say
