The cloud under fire

Iranian drones struck three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Persian Gulf. Two data centres in the UAE were hit directly and one in Bahrain was damaged by a drone that landed nearby. AWS said the strikes caused "structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage." All three facilities remain offline.

The IRGC claimed the attack on the Bahrain facility, alleging Amazon supports the US military. They are not entirely wrong: AWS holds significant contracts with the Department of Defence and American intelligence agencies. But the effects go well beyond the military. In the UAE, banking services from ADCB and Emirates NBD went down, along with payments platforms Alaan and Hubpay, and the ride-hailing and delivery app Careem. AWS advised customers to migrate workloads to other regions and redirect traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.

It is the first time a US hyperscaler's infrastructure has been struck in an armed conflict. The fact that Iran hit data centres while Israel and the US bombed at least two data centres in Tehran, one linked to the Revolutionary Guards, is no coincidence. Data centres are ceasing to be civilian infrastructure and becoming legitimate military targets in the eyes of belligerents. Amazon has three Middle East regions: Bahrain, the UAE and Israel, all launched since 2019. Microsoft has a presence in Qatar, the UAE and Israel, with $15 billion committed to the region. The war has just demonstrated that the expansion of cloud computing in the Middle East carries a risk no market analysis had properly accounted for.