Way back when I worked at eBay, we once had a major outage and needed datacenter access. The datacenter process normally took about 5 minutes per person to verify identity and employment, and then scan past the biometric scanners.

On that day, the VP showed up and told the security staff, "just open all the doors!". So they did. If you knew where the datacenter was, you could just walk-in in mess with eBay servers. But since we were still a small ops team, we pretty much knew everyone who was supposed to be there. So security was basically "does someone else recognize you?".

The story was that they had to use an angle grinder to get in.

I assume they needed their own air supply because the automatic poison gas system was activating. Then they had to dodge lazers to get to the one button that would stop the nuclear missle launch.

add a bunch of other poinless scifi and evil villan lair tropes in as well...

Not an active datacenter, but I did get to use a fire extinguisher to knock out a metal-mesh-reinforced window in a secure building once because no one knew where the keys were for an important room.

Management was not happy, but I didn’t get in trouble for it. And yes, it was awesome. Surprisingly easy, especially since the fire extinguisher was literally right next to it.

Depends. Some have a paranoid mode without caching, because then a physical attacker cannot snip a cable and then use a stolen keycard as easily or something. We had an audit force us to disable caching, which promptly went south at a power outage 2 months later where the electricians couldn't get into the switch room anymore. The door was easy to overcome, however, just a little fiddling with a credit card, no heroic hydraulic press story ;)

This sounds similar to AWS services depending on DynamoDB, which sounds like what happened here. Even if under the hood parts of AWS depend on Dynamo, it should be a walled-off instance separate from Dynamo available via us-east-1.

I was there at the time, for anyone outside of the core networking teams it was functionally a snow day. I had my manager's phone number, and basically established that everyone was in the same boat and went to the park.

Core services teams had backup communication systems in place prior to that though. IIRC it was a private IRC on separate infra specifically for that type of scenario.