Amazon Web Services is experiencing its second service disruption in the Middle East since the start of the Iran war, less than a month ago.
AWS services in Bahrain were disrupted this week due to drone activity in the region, Amazon said.
“We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” an Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo. “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.”
Earlier this month, Amazon’s cloud service provider experienced another outage when a drone strike hit near an operating facility in Bahrain, and another hit the company’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates. The strikes caused structural damage, power disruptions, and water damage, AWS said at the time.
The attacks were the first time an American tech giant’s data centers were targeted in military action. Iranian state media later described the attack on the Bahrain facility as intentionally targeted, saying that it was launched to “identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.”
The United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, starting a war that has now entered its fourth week and engulfed the entire region in turmoil. The impact of the war has extended beyond the Middle East, with fuel prices skyrocketing around the world and Iranian forces naming American companies operating in the region as legitimate targets.
Earlier this month, a media agency affiliated with the Iranian regime released a list of big tech companies that the Iranian forces had described as new targets due to their links to American and Israeli military operations. According to that list, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle’s offices and cloud infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf region are now targets for potential Iranian strikes. A similarly aligned group also told Al Jazeera around the same time that American and Israeli economic centers and banks in the region are potential targets, warning civilians to “not be within a one-kilometre radius of banks.”
The targeting of major American infrastructure began following an Israeli attack on a bank branch in Iran’s capital city of Tehran, the regime-aligned news agency said earlier this month.
The U.S. has made similar threats to Iranian infrastructure, with President Trump most recently vowing to “hit and obliterate” the country’s power plants if Iranian forces don’t resume free traffic flow on the critical oil transit chokepoint, Strait of Hormuz.
Trump said over the weekend that his administration was engaged in “very strong talks” to end the war, but Iranian authorities have denied the claim, and the war continues to rage on with no end in sight. Israel said on Tuesday that it was intent on retaining control of parts of southern Lebanon, while a New York Times report claimed that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been pushing Trump to continue the war, seeing it as an opportunity to remake the region.
Read the full article here
