The tech industry often talks about “the cloud” as though it were something abstract and untouchable. But the cloud runs on data centers, those data centers have an address, and that address can be hit by a drone.
Last week, three data centers operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS), two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, were struck by Iranian drones or missiles. The attacks forced the facilities offline and led to service outages affecting banking, payments, delivery apps, and enterprise software across the region.
The U.S. military also uses AWS to run some of its workloads, including running Anthropic’s AI model Claude for some intelligence functions, and Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram that the Bahrain facility had been deliberately targeted “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.” AWS has declined to comment on the Iranian claim and it is not known whether the attacks impacted…
