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As the USA’s war with Iran shows no signs of letting up, strikes on data centers are putting not just human lives in peril, but even customer data.
According to a September 15 Amazon Web Services update, Iranian drone strikes left some of the tech giant’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in tatters. The company admitted that it was “unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted” on local data centers. The damage extended across several “availability zones,” which are clusters of one or more data centers in the same region.
“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” Amazon admitted.
As the company points out, the drone strikes first began in March, first highlighting how critical digital infrastructure near an active warzone has quickly become a major vulnerability, giving Iranian forces a key target and plenty of leverage.
It’s a particularly pertinent topic due to how much money is being poured into Gulf states to expand key infrastructure to support AI.
In March, major strikes on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain caused “structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” Amazon wrote in an update at the time.
In response, Amazon Web Services called on customers to move their data to other cloud regions and take advantage of any remote backups.
In April, Iranian drones struck Amazon data centers in Bahrain once more, causing a major “service disruption.”
Iran has clearly hit a nerve. As the AI industry continues to make enormous investments in expanding data centers across the Middle East, geopolitical instability triggered by the Trump administration’s war could prove to be a major stumbling block for businesses.
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