Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have carried out yet another strike on a data center in the Middle East. This time they have carried out missile strikes on an Amazon Web Service (AWS) data center in Bahrain. This is part of the ongoing US-Israel-Iran war in the Middle East.
In an official statement, the public relations team of the IRGC claimed that it had “attacked and destroyed” the central infrastructure of Amazon’s data center in Bahrain in retaliation for US strikes on a nuclear power plant under construction in Darkhovin, located in Khuzestan province, in south-western Iran.
AWS’s service health dashboard offers no confirmation of the strike on the Bahrain data center, as the latest update remains one from Apr 30 12:25 AM PDT and refers to a previous strike in UAE. It said, “We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruption. The Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications.”
Readers will recall that on Sunday, March 1, power was temporarily shut down at an Amazon data center in the UAE, after it was “impacted by objects that struck the data center.” There were reports of “fire and sparks” at the facility. Then on March 2, two more AWS data centers were targeted – one in the UAE, and another in Bahrain. This time Amazon clearly attributed the damage to drone strikes.
The escalation of violence in the Middle East raised concerns over the safety of the region’s thriving digital infrastructure landscape, especially since Iran subsequently specifically named 18 tech companies including Cisco, Oracle, NVIDIA, and G42 as “legitimate targets”. Iran also went on to single out Stargate UAE as a target.