Overview
- Reports on Wednesday described a missile strike on Batelco’s Hamala headquarters in Bahrain, which hosts Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and the Financial Times said AWS operations in the country were damaged, while Bahrain’s Interior Ministry reported a fire after what it called an Iranian attack.
- Hours before the reports, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps named 18 companies as “legitimate targets” and set a start time of 8 p.m. Tehran on April 1, warning staff to evacuate workplaces and telling residents within one kilometer of listed facilities to move to safety.
- The list spans U.S. tech and industrial giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Palantir, Tesla, Boeing, GE, JPMorgan, plus UAE firms G42 and Spire Solutions, with companies fielding inquiries and some, like Intel, saying they are safeguarding staff and sites.
- Earlier in March, Iranian attacks struck two AWS-linked data centers in the UAE and damaged a Bahrain facility, causing outages that hit banking, payments, deliveries, and other digital services across the Gulf, underscoring how commercial clouds underpin daily life and government work.
- Attribution and damage details remain patchy as several claims flow through Iranian state-linked outlets or single sources, yet a sustained campaign against corporate infrastructure could disrupt regional services, raise legal questions over civilian targets, and spill into global cloud-dependent operations.