Amazon Data Centers “Disrupted” Across Bahrain After Drone Activity

Brent crude futures are back in triple-digit territory as fighting in the Middle East continued overnight, even as President Trump claimed that talks are underway with Iran to resolve the conflict, which has now entered its fourth week.

Overnight, the Amazon Web Services in the Bahrain region was severely “disrupted,” according to Reuters, citing an Amazon spokesperson, following drone activity in the area. The spokesperson would not confirm whether Iranian drones struck any data centers.

“As this situation evolves and, as we have advised before, we request those with workloads in the affected regions continue to migrate to other locations,” Amazon wrote in a statement.

Bahrain News Agency reported on Monday that its armed forces had intercepted and destroyed 147 Iranian ballistic missiles and 282 drones since the start of the conflict. 

Amazon’s cloud computing unit is critical for Bahrain’s digital infrastructure and is embedded in public-sector cloud operations. 

This disruption to AWS data centers in the Gulf is the second instance in the US-Iran conflict of IRGC forces targeting data centers with drones in early March. 

Latest reporting:

• Data Center Hunter: Iran Expands Drone Target List, From AWS To Microsoft Facilities

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“The targeting of Amazon and Microsoft in these operations has dealt a serious blow to the enemy’s technological and information infrastructure,” Iranian news outlet Fars News Agency said in a Telegram post, as quoted by the Financial Times earlier this month.

We warned, one month before two AWS data centers in the UAE were hit by IRGC drones, that Wall Street analysts had completely missed the fact that, with trillions of dollars being deployed over the next several years worldwide on data center buildouts, one major security gap had emerged: the urgent need for counter-UAS systems.

We know exactly why Wall Street analysts completely missed this security gap: they were too weirdly fixated on a non-existent climate crisis and could not properly identify the most immediate threat. These Ivy League-educated analysts simply had the wrong framework to operate on.

Since the US-Iran conflict began, it has confirmed that civilian infrastructure will not be spared (and in fact increasingly targeted over explicit military assets), and this is a wake-up call for data-center builders worldwide. Time to deploy counter-UAS systems.

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