Overview
- AWS confirmed two UAE facilities were directly struck and a Bahrain site was damaged, taking all three offline and disrupting banking, payments, and consumer apps across the region.
- Iran’s Fars News cast the Bahrain attack as probing military support roles, but Amazon declined comment and there is no public evidence U.S. military workloads were hit, with classified AWS regions located in the United States unaffected.
- Experts say these are the first deliberate air strikes on data centers and warn that commercial cloud hubs have become vulnerable targets in modern conflict.
- Specialists highlight exposed cooling systems and backup power as weak points and suggest Middle East facilities may need new counter‑drone or missile‑defense measures.
- Observers warn outages could shift workloads to other regions, slowing processing and raising costs, while concurrent risks to Red Sea cables and Gulf chokepoints threaten wider global disruption.