AWS is Prepared for the Zombie Apocalypse
Description
This is a screenshot of a tweet from user Gedda (@gedda) that highlights a real and famous clause in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Terms of Service. The tweet text reads: 'AWS terms of service. (§42.10) "...will not apply in the event of the occurrence of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue..."'. This is a well-known Easter egg, specifically from the terms for the AWS Lumberyard game engine. The humor lies in the stark contrast between the dry, formal nature of a legal document and the ridiculously specific, fantastical scenario of a zombie apocalypse. It's a piece of tech trivia that resonates with developers who appreciate when large corporations show a sense of humor, especially when it's buried deep within pages of otherwise tedious legal text
Comments
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Glad to know my critical services are covered by the AWS Zombie Apocalypse Exemption. My biggest concern wasn't service downtime, it was whether my EC2 instances would be reanimated to serve a zombie master
According to §42.10, the SLA dies in a zombie outbreak but our 3-year Reserved Instances will keep shambling on - apparently the AWS billing daemon has five nines of persistence
Finally, a cloud provider that acknowledges the real disaster recovery scenario we've all been preparing for - not regional outages or DDoS attacks, but the inevitable zombie apocalypse where your auto-scaling groups won't help when the instances themselves start consuming brains instead of CPU cycles
Ah yes, AWS §42.10 - the clause that finally answers the age-old architectural question: 'But will it survive the zombie apocalypse?' Turns out your 99.99% SLA doesn't cover undead DDoS attacks. This is what happens when your legal team has too much time between reviewing Reserved Instance contracts - they start planning for edge cases that are *literally* at the edge of human existence. At least now we know that when the apocalypse comes, AWS will be down, but at least they won't be liable for it. Good to see Amazon thinking about their long-term support strategy
AWS ToS covers zombie outbreaks but not the real undead horror: a Lambda cold start during the apocalypse
AWS ToS has a zombie clause: Multi-AZ is covered, Multi-Z isn’t; shared responsibility means they manage fault domains, you manage bite domains
Turns out our SLA is five nines - unless the incident is multi‑bite, in which case Legal auto‑scales our liability to zero while Reserved Instances keep billing from beyond the grave