Drone strikes targeting Amazon datacenters raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacentre by the armed forces of a country at war.
At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacentre in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water.
Soon after, a second data centre owned by the US tech company was hit. Then a third was said to be in trouble, this time in Bahrain, after an Iranian suicide drone turned to fireball on striking land nearby.
Iranian state TV has claimed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the attack “to identify the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”.
The network built by Jeff Bezos’s company could withstand one of its regional centres being taken out of action but not a second, let alone a third of their huge warehouses of technology.
The coordinated strike had an immediate impact.
Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday unable to pay for a taxi, order a food delivery, or check their bank balance on their mobile apps.
Whether there was a military impact is unclear – but the strikes swiftly brought the war directly into the lives of 11 million people in the UAE, nine out of 10 of whom are foreign nationals. Amazon has advised its clients to secure their data away from the region. [Continue reading…]