The backup generators suddenly kicked in, but they were idling away. For some reason, the power wasn’t reaching the servers inside the facility, and the machines had already consumed most of the battery power that temporarily kept them going during a blackout.

It was at this moment that James Hamilton and his team pulled into the parking lot to salvage the day for AWS. “We arrived just as the servers were starting to come down,” Hamilton remembered during a recent speech at an Amazon conference in Las Vegas. “Super Annoying” was the term he used but it was nothing short of a disaster for the virtual world because names such as Netflix, Pinterest, and Dropbox depended on AWS for their services and an abrupt data centre shutdown could mean total loss of function for the sites. Hamilton and his team eventually realized the switches that were supposed to route backup power into the facility weren’t properly designed for the cloud computing giant’s data centers. So he began designing one that would fit the role.

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