Attack from Iran on Amazon (AWS) data center in Dubai - Data destroyed, Digital services halted

In direct response to the joint airstrikes launched by the United States and Israel against Iran, on April 1, Iran used Shahed-136 drones to attack two Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers located in the United Arab Emirates. Additionally, another AWS center in Bahrain suffered collateral damage from this series of attacks.

This marks the first confirmed physical military attack by a state actor targeting commercial cloud data centers during an armed conflict, severely highlighting the vulnerability of global digital infrastructure. It is reported that digital systems relying on these services in and around Dubai have become inoperable. There are also reports that a large amount of public secure data may have been destroyed, causing irreparable damage.

These attacks mark a turning point in modern warfare, with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their state media, Fars and Tasnim news agencies, stating that these data centers were legitimate military targets. They accused these centers of supporting US military and intelligence operations, as well as running artificial intelligence models (such as Anthropic's Claude) for war simulations. Furthermore, Iran has issued strong warnings that the infrastructure of over 18 other US technology companies in the Gulf region, including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and IBM, have been added to their target list.

The dawn drone attacks caused severe physical damage to data centers in the UAE, including fires, structural damage, and power outages, with additional water damage resulting from firefighting efforts. Consequently, digital services across the Gulf region were disrupted, leading to significant outages from March 3 to 6 for mobile applications and digital banking operations of major banks like First Abu Dhabi Bank, Emirates NBD, and ADCB, as well as delivery services like Careem and business software. This has had a severe economic impact on the Gulf countries' efforts to become a global hub for artificial intelligence and data management.

In response to this situation, the United States and Israel reportedly launched counter-attacks on two data centers in Tehran (one of which is linked to the IRGC organization), and information has emerged that the AWS center in Bahrain was attacked again in early April. Similar to past attacks on critical infrastructure like oil refineries or power plants, these expensive data centers, symbols of Western technological dominance, have now become military targets. Legal and security experts point out that this necessitates treating civilian and commercial data centers as extremely critical infrastructure and establishing specialized defense systems to protect them from missile attacks.