Sad times StackOverflow takes down all its physical servers

https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/12/24/the-great-unracking-saying-goodbye-to-the-servers-at-our-physical-datacenter/

62•slroger•1mo ago

Comments

slroger•1mo ago

Very sad that StackOverflow which was one of the best examples of self hosted infrastructure is now unracking and decommissioning all of its hardware.

rzerowan•1mo ago

With the sadder realisation from the article that more independent co-lo facilities are getting shutdown leaving many largescale deployments withno recourse but to go to the cloud for hyperscale. As a business at least in the US , im not seeing any greeenfield facilities being spun up to compete with the big5(Oracle/Google/Azure/Amazon/IBM) clouds.

tstrimple•1mo ago

A number of cloud migrations I've worked on are due to these reasons. If you're the second largest customer at a colo, and the largest is pulling all of their equipment out, chances are the colo won't be around much longer and you need to start getting proactive. Some of the companies are on very tight migration timelines because the colo announced they are closing down and were caught flat footed.

p2detar•1mo ago

> For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed. Nothing was being kept.

Wow! That’d sure be some waste of disk drives and memory. Do they destroy it themselves or some contractor does this?

exceptione•1mo ago

I don't like it. Giving away or selling the components for free would have been better than just throwing it at the dump. I appreciate the PII concerns, but these days disks have built-in sanitation procedures, as part of an industry-wide program to reduce waste.

And if you throw away memory for PII concerns, that would be beyond crazy.

jsiepkes•1mo ago

> We’ve since moved all our sites to the cloud. Our servers are now cattle, not pets

Because if you host your own servers and infra they are automatically pets? Seems like a weird statement. I think that phrase was even coined before cloud became really big.

mindslight•1mo ago

Many cattle have names and given that it takes a bunch of cloud instances to do what a small menagerie of self-hosted servers can do, I'd say a better analogy is an infestation of rats.

ChrisArchitect•1mo ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44612736

moralestapia•1mo ago

Sad?

Great news for me! LOL.

Trashy site cannot disappear any sooner.

amai•1mo ago

So now Stackoverflow will also go down if the cloud is down: https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/aws-outage-analysis-octobe...

How are all the cloud engineers going to solve their issues if Stackoverflow is down?

exceptione•1mo ago

I first laughed, then I realized that some of those indeed will bump into an extra surprise. Luckily, all the chatbots have a copy of SO.

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