Standing in his well-manicured suburban garden in northern Virginia, Bala Thumma looked over the fence to where a giant data center is about to go up.

'It's going to be humungous,' he told the Daily Mail. 'Three times the size of my home. We'll be about 500ft away and the noise when the generators are on will be above 90 decibels.'

Not only that, it means his once quiet residential lane of million-dollar detached houses will soon be surrounded on all sides by the sinister-looking behemoths.

At the top of the cul-de-sac there already looms a giant black and red one. At the other end of the street bulldozers are busy excavating a massive 200-acre site for yet another. A traditional old barn and grain silo, relics of what used to be rolling farmland, are coming down.

'I'm not opposed to progress, said Thumma, a 47, an IT consultant. 'Tech is my bread and butter. But you don't see this anywhere else in the country.'

Or, indeed, on the planet. There are hundreds of data centers in this previously serene corner of Northern Virginia, about an hour west of Washington D.C.

Staggeringly, two third's of the world's internet traffic passes through them.

On Monday, the web faced a massive three-hour disruption across the world that hit a litany of services including including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms. Those affected included Netflix, Disney+, ChatGPT, Fortnite and Roblox.

The problem was traced to Amazon Web Services' US-East-1 region, its biggest cluster of data centers, in northern Virginia.

AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure for many of the world's biggest online businesses, along with government departments and universities.

While it's not possible to determine which particular center was the source, one of them is a stone's throw from Laura Thomas's back porch, and looms over a nearby Greek orthodox church and preschool.

'It's a pain in the ass,' Thomas, 69, told the Daily Mail. 'The traffic means I can't see to get out of my neighborhood. It used to be woods. There were deer. I would rather have had the woods and the wildlife.'