Data centers become new targets in Iran conflict; 3 Amazon stores in UAE and Bahrain hit by drones
The tech giant said three of Amazon’s data centers – two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain – were targeted by drones, disrupting cloud services and computing facilities in areas including West Asia’s banking industry.Amazon’s cloud arm, Amazon Web Services Availability Zone (AWS), has warned of long-term disruptions to its services following drone attacks over the past two days.“In the UAE, two of our facilities came under direct attack, while in Bahrain, a drone strike close to one of our facilities caused a physical impact on our infrastructure,” AWS said in an update on its status page. Iran has launched a series of drones and missiles at Gulf states in retaliation for a U.S. and Israeli attack that killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. Iran has also attacked energy facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.Amazon said repairs are underway but “due to the scale of the damage, recovery times are expected to be extended.”While critical facilities ranging from ports and airports to refineries and industrial complexes have long been the target of such attacks, Iran’s focus on Amazon facilities shows just how important data centers have become in an era where data is often described as the new oil. Disabling one data center can bring down multiple systems.The scale of the damage was evident as the UAE stock market remained closed on Monday and Tuesday due to technical outages, thousands of passengers were stranded at airports in Dubai and Kuwait, and an AWS outage also impacted passenger and flight services.Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on
