Comment by ziml77
5 years ago
Is there any liability if Facebook had brought everything up at once and caused brownouts? Seems like it would be some form of negligence on their part harming a shared resource, but I don't know if there's any laws or contract terms with the power company that require them to pay if they mess up like that.
My girlfriend works in a large grid operator (in Europe). According to her there are lots of regulations and contracts on the grid operators about how they must handle reliability. So it's unlikely that Facebook would be liable if this took down half the country, because then it was the grid operator not living up to their agreements on reliability.
There are a lot of automated fail-safes on this, and apparently larger industry (which a datacenter is as well) will get disconnected from the grid automatically in emergency situations before they drop residential areas. But in the end they will drop one by one everything they need to keep the larger grid running. It's not even a networked "smart" management system, the distribution points automatically react to voltage and frequency drops and they're set up to break some things like industry earlier than others.