Break Xbox Live With The Push Of A Button

That button may look like a joke, an elaborate piece of stock art, or something out of Ghostbusters, but it’s not. It’s the emergency shutdown button located in a Microsoft server facility in Quincy, Washington.

There’s a fascinating article over on the NY Times’ website about server warehouses, with the author taking a trip to a Microsoft complex in Tukwila, Washington that is “one of the global homes of Microsoft’s Xbox Live”. While the above picture is from a different, nearby facility (in Quincy), they’d surely be the same all over.

One push and a million angry nerds cry out in terror, then are suddenly silenced.

Course, it’d take more than one shutdown to bring the whole network down – after all, there’s a global network of servers running the thing – but it’d surely make a dent in a lot of people’s evenings.

Me, I’d have to hit it, if only once. Just so I could say “When the light is green, the trap is clean”.

Data centre Overload [NY Times, via Gizmodo]