Commercial data centers emerge as targets in modern warfare after drones hit 3 AWS facilities

Amazon Web Services is grappling with widespread service disruptions this week after drone strikes severely damaged three of the cloud provider’s data centers in the Middle East during a surge of intense military actions in the region. According to a series of updates officials are posting on the AWS Health Dashboard about the situation and their ongoing response efforts, military drones “directly struck” two facilities in the United Arab Emirates, while a separate drone explosion in close proximity to one of its major facilities in Bahrain caused physical impacts to infrastructure there. The data centers were reportedly hit by uncrewed systems in a retaliatory campaign following the joint U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury against Iran. AWS subsequently urged all customers facing outages and other issues to activate their disaster recovery plans. “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” officials wrote on Monday. “We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.” As AWS hustles to get its data and services transitioned elsewhere and back online, multiple analysts have pointed out that this incident likely marks the first publicly confirmed instance of a hyperscale data center run by a U.S. company being physically affected in real-world combat. Data centers are specialized facilities that house the hardware elements underpinning IT infrastructure that stores and processes data — including servers, transformers, racks of networking equipment, storage systems and more. Heavy-duty power, cooling, fire suppression, and security systems also support those components. Cloud outages can disturb the economy, as well as global military and business operations, so ensuring the security and function of data centers is a high priority for the U.S. government. DefenseScoop asked AWS spokespersons Tuesday whether the data, services and applications at the three facilities impacted by drone strikes were associated with any U.S. government or military workloads, and if any personnel were harmed or killed on the ground in Bahrain and the UAE. A spokesperson did not directly answer those questions, instead referring the publication to the latest updates released to the general public on the AWS Health Dashboard. The AWS official highlighted entries from the dashboard about how the company’s response is occurring “across multiple workstreams” and directing customers with workloads running in the Middle East to now take action to migrate their digital assets over to regions elsewhere in the world. Pentagon spokespersons did not immediately respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment. Press releases and blog posts by AWS in recent years suggest that Bahrain has migrated “around 85 percent of government data” to the AWS Bahrain Region since 2019, and AWS UAE data centers have hosted workloads for government, financial and logistics sectors there. “AWS does keep all classified and sensitive [Impact Level 4 and Impact Level 5 government] operations co-located in the U.S. — but there certainly could be contractor and non-operational data in the facilities that may have been impacted,” Sean Gorman, Air Force contractor and CEO of Zephr.xyz, told DefenseScoop Tuesday. Working with the Ukrainian Volunteer Army’s “Separate Service of UAV,” Gorman and his team previously analyzed Russia’s GPS jamming attacks and the evolving drone and counter-drone warfare on the front lines of the war in Ukraine. He also served as a subject matter expert for the DHS Critical Infrastructure Task Force and Homeland Security Advisory Council. “What we’re seeing with the AWS strikes is the convergence of two trends that became very clear on the Ukrainian front lines : the democratization of precision strike capability through low-cost drones, and the increasing co-location of military-relevant and commercial digital infrastructure in contested regions,” Gorman said. Pointing to “the political and economic dimension of these attacks,” Gorman noted that “Iran isn’t using drone warfare primarily for tactical military effect, but rather to terrorize the region, incite domestic tensions, put political pressure on the U.S. to halt its strikes, and inflict economic pain.” “The drones are a political and economic instrument as much as a military one,” he said. Further, disrupting or degrading any major cloud provider’s operations, even temporarily, likely signals to every multinational entity with infrastructure in the region that their business continuity is exposed, Gorman suggested. “This conflict is making clear what’s been building for years, which is that civilian and commercial infrastructure are now primary targets in modern warfare, precisely because they sit at the intersection of political and economic pressure,” he added. “That is increasingly where conflicts are fought and won.” There are two potential levels of risk with digital infrastructure being hit, in Gorman’s view. “The first is the direct loss of the compute capacity provided by the data centers and the rest of the AWS infrastructure being able to absorb the additional load through other data centers in the region,” he said. “The second risk is the possibility of critical routing infrastructure being impacted.” There are a limited number of fiber optic routes and oceanic cable landings for traffic to be routed between data centers and end users. If those pathways and routing infrastructure are impacted by strikes, it could make it difficult to shift compute load to new regions. And although data center capacity has been growing aggressively over the past few years, the diversity of international fiber routes connecting them has not. “This creates strategic vulnerabilities across the region. Accidental transoceanic fiber cuts in the Middle East have been documented as highly impactful cutting off entire regions,” Gorman told DefenseScoop. “A more strategic attack on this infrastructure could seriously impact digital capacity and reliability in the region.” The post Commercial data centers emerge as targets in modern warfare after drones hit 3 AWS facilities appeared first on DefenseScoop .