Iran Conflict: Data centres new target in Iran conflict; 3 Amazon units hit by drones in UAE, Bahrain | India News
Three Amazon data centers – two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain – were targeted by drones, disrupting cloud services and computing facilities in areas such as banking across West Asia, the technology chief said.Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services Availability Zone (AWS) has warned of prolonged disruption to its services following drone strikes over the past two days.“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly hit, while in Bahrain, a drone strike near one of our facilities caused a physical impact on our infrastructure,” AWS said in an update on its status page. Iran has fired drones and missiles at Gulf states in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. Iran has also attacked energy facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.Repairs are ongoing but “recovery is expected to be prolonged depending on the extent of the damage”, Amazon said.While critical facilities ranging from ports and airports to refineries and industrial complexes have been targets of such attacks, Iran’s focus on Amazon facilities shows how important data centers have become in today’s era when data is often described as the new oil. Disabling a data center can bring down multiple systems.While the scale of the damage was evident as the UAE stock market was closed on Monday and Tuesday due to the technology outage and thousands of fliers were stranded at airports in Dubai and Kuwait, the AWS disruption also affected passenger and flight services.Chris McGuire, a senior fellow on China and Emerging Technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in X: “Reuters reported that an object hit an AWS data center in the United Arab Emirates, causing it to catch fire and shut down. It is believed to have been an Iranian drone strike, marking the first time a commercial data center has been physically targeted.”
