Amazon data centers in Persian Gulf hit amid Mideast conflict

By Abdulkadir Gunyol

ISTANBUL (AA) - Amazon announced on Monday that sparks and fires broke out at its data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates after objects struck the buildings, but did not directly blame the hostilities in the Middle East, with both countries targeted by attacks.

Amazon’s cloud unit data centers in the two countries are currently facing severe power and connectivity issues.

Two physical clusters of data centers in the UAE on Monday suffered complete power outages.

Amazon did not explicitly link the incident to ongoing Iranian missile strikes.

Shanaka Anslem Perera, a tech analyst, said on X that Amazon is opting to call missile or drone debris “objects” because there is a lack of jargon for this kind of scenario, namely the first time a giant cloud service provider’s data center was hit during a war.

Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity expert, echoed the sentiment on X.

“‘Objects that struck the data center’ — the gentlest description of a missile strike since ‘special military operation’,” he said. “The first time in history an ‘availability zone’ became unavailable for ballistic reasons.”

Olejnik said Amazon’s UAE data center went completely offline overnight Saturday to Sunday, and while Amazon Web Services (AWS), the tech giant’s cloud subsidiary, informed its users of the fires, it still did not clarify what objects struck the infrastructure.

“Connecting the dots is left to the reader — services are expected to return in ‘multiple hours,’” he added.

Levent Eraslan, a social media expert at Türkiye’s Anadolu University and founder of the NGO Sodimer, said on X that Iran’s targeting of AWS infrastructure showed that the war expanded beyond the military field and entered the digital infrastructure.

“Data centers, cloud systems, and digital networks are as strategically important as energy facilities or military bases today,” he said. “Such a move would be seen as an asymmetric cyber power message against American tech infrastructure.”

“Data and infrastructure control is one of the invisible but most critical frontiers of war in the digital age,” he added.

*Writing by Emir Yildirim