8 petabytes is absolute peanuts for a state actor. The fact that they put it on a cloud in the first place indicates that someone made some stupid fucking decisions or there were kickbacks or they are lying about shutting them off and this is PR.
Like, seriously. That is maybe 3 or 4U worth of high capacity drives. Less if you get the biggest drives available right now. Literally you can buy that for less than $1 Million if you don’t need backups. All told the hardware would be like $5 million including redundancy.
On top of that, there are off the shelf data management systems that can manage data storage and retrieval of the files as well as the transcripts.
Here’s what I’m betting they changed: the cloud services to transcribe and translate the intercept are still in use and they just removed the storage.
