Amazon's Bahrain data center targeted by Iran for support of U.S. military, state media says

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has reportedly aimed its sights on Amazon's data center in Bahrain, citing the tech giant's support for U.S. military operations. This information was disclosed by Iranian state media on Wednesday. Over the weekend, Amazon's cloud computing division revealed that one of its facilities in Bahrain suffered damage due to a nearby drone strike. Additionally, two data centers located in the United Arab Emirates were reportedly hit directly by drones. As a result, all affected facilities remain offline, as noted on the Amazon Web Services health dashboard. According to Iran's Fars News Agency, the drone attack was part of a mission to assess the involvement of these data centers in bolstering the military and intelligence capabilities of their adversaries. This escalation follows coordinated strikes by the U.S. and Israel against Iranian targets over the weekend, prompting retaliatory actions by Iran against bases associated with both nations across the Gulf. Amazon representatives have yet to respond to inquiries regarding the incident. The attacks not only caused structural damage but also resulted in power outages and water damage, exacerbated by firefighting efforts to extinguish resulting sparks and flames. Consequently, several popular AWS applications have reported increased error rates and diminished availability. In light of these developments, AWS has urged its cloud customers to back up their data, consider relocating workloads to alternate regions, and reroute traffic away from both Bahrain and the UAE to mitigate potential disruptions.