Iran Drones Hit 2 AWS Sites, Exposing Data Center War Risk
Updated
Updated · Forbes · Jul 24
Iran Drones Hit 2 AWS Sites, Exposing Data Center War Risk
3 articles · Updated · Forbes · Jul 24
Summary
March 1 drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, knocking dozens of cloud services offline for much of a day and leaving some regional capacity degraded for months.
AWS told customers repairs would take months and advised them to shift workloads and restore from remote backups, underscoring how physical attacks can disrupt commercial cloud infrastructure, not just cyber operations.
Georgia Tech and RUSI analysts called it the first deliberate wartime targeting of commercial cloud infrastructure by a state, turning data centers into a recognized military vulnerability.
That shift is boosting attention on off-planet backup pitches such as Lonestar Data Holdings, which has flown lunar storage twice but suffered 2 flawed landings and still faces high costs and an unproven business model.
The stakes are rising as AI drives ever-larger campuses, including Meta's planned 5-gigawatt Louisiana site, making concentration of data and compute a bigger resilience and sovereignty concern.