It is all about hazard/risk modeling and mitigation. E.g. Someone rm -rf / ing the server will happen eventually with near 100% certainty in any company and ca

It is all about hazard/risk modeling and mitigation. E.g. Someone rm -rf / ing the server will happen eventually with near 100% certainty in any company and can be mitigated by tested, regular, multiply redundant backups. Cosmic rays flipping bits will happen with near 100% probability at the scale someone like Amazon works at can by mitigated by redundant copies and filesystems with checksum style checks. Similar with hard drive failure. Earthquakes will happen in some areas with near certainty over the time periods companies like Amazon presumably hope to be in business and could be mitigated by having multiple datacenters and well constructed buildings. Similar for 'normal' scale volcanoes. Fires will happen but they can be mitigated (with appropriate buildings and redundancy). Small meteorite stikes are unlikely but can be mitigated by redundancy. Solar activity causing an electomagnetic storm - yeah one can shield one's datacenter in a Faraday cage but in this situation the whole world is probably in chaos and one's datacenter will be the least of one's concerns (unless shielding become standard in which case you'd better be doing it). Similar applies for nuclear war, super volcanoes, massive meteorite strikes or other global events at the interesting end of the scale. But yeah there are going to be things that get missed. They key is having an organization that (1) learns from its mistakes and (2) learns from others' mistakes and continually keeps their risk modeling and mitigation measures up to date. And note that many of the hazards that are worth mitigating have the same mitigation i.e. redundancy (at different scales).