NEW DELHI: Data centres have emerged as new targets, with Iran launching attacks on three such facilities in what is being seen as an attempt to destabilise operations.Three Amazon data centres – two in the UAE and one in Bahrain – were targeted by drones, disrupting cloud services and computing facilities in areas like banking across West Asia, the tech major has said.Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services Availability Zone (AWS) has warned of prolonged disruptions of its services after the drone strikes in the last two days.“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impact to our infrastructure,” AWS said in an update on its status page. Iran has fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf countries in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. Iran has also struck energy facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.Repairs are ongoing but “recovery is expected to be prolonged given the scale of damage”, Amazon said.While critical installations ranging from ports and airports to refineries and industrial complexes have been the target of such attacks, Iran’s focus on Amazon’s facilities shows how critical data centres have become in today’s times when data is often described as the new oil. Disabling one data centre can take down multiple systems.The scale of damage was evident as the UAE stock market remained closed on Monday and Tuesday due to tech outages, and thousands of flyers were stranded at airports in Dubai and Kuwait, with AWS disruptions also affecting passenger and flight services.Chris McGuire, who is a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on X: “Reuters reports that an object struck an AWS data center in the UAE, causing a fire and shutting it down. Assuming this was an Iranian drone strike, it is the first time a commercial data center was physically targeted in a conflict. It won’t be the last.”
