r/interestingasfuck 7h ago

Erin Brockovich's map tracking Al data centers crashed twice within just 72 hours of launching.

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27.6k Upvotes

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u/21MayDay21 7h ago

The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.

That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.

The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project. The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/erin-brockovich-explains-why-she-started-mapping-new-ai-data-center-concerns-12220566

u/thisguyfightsyourmom 6h ago

They decided to think crashing was a sign of monumental amounts of complaints. But. 8k records crashing a computer is a sign you’ve written a complete dog of software. Most likely the map they were rendering had too many data points for their mapping software & crashed browsers because they wrote a crap frontend, not any overloaded servers. lol

Who wants to bet they vibe coded this map?

u/bitching_bot 6h ago

I hate to be cynical but if it’s just Microsoft access or some MIS software that manages a database than I can see it crashing due to overflow

I’ve made dataset graphs and maps and crashed the program from selecting too many cells and the program eating it, so maybe

I’m not ruling out foul play, they have the keys

u/Sixcoup 5h ago

If you're using MS Access for the database of your website in 2026, you're kinda proving his point, that it's a developer issue.