Bahrain Representative Image – Representative Image New Delhi: As data centers have emerged as the new targets, Iran has launched attacks on three such facilities in what is being seen as an attempt to destabilize operations. The tech major has said that three Amazon data centers – two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain – were targeted by drones, causing disruption to cloud services and computing facilities in sectors such as banking across Middle East Asia.

Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services Availability Zones (AWS) has warned of prolonged disruption to its services following drone attacks over the past two years. Day.

“In the United Arab Emirates, two of our facilities were directly attacked, while in Bahrain, a drone strike close to one of our facilities caused a material impact to our infrastructure,” AWS said in an update on its status page. Iran has launched a barrage of drones and missiles on Gulf states in retaliation for US and Israeli attacks that killed its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday.

Iran has also attacked energy facilities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Repairs are ongoing, Amazon said, but “given the scale of the damage the recovery is expected to be lengthy”. That’s how important data centers have become in today’s time when data is often described as the new oil.

Disabling one data center can shut down many systems. The scale of the damage was clear as the UAE stock market remained closed on Monday and Tuesday due to technical glitches, and thousands of passengers were stranded at airports in Dubai and Kuwait, with passenger and flight services also being affected due to the AWS disruption.

Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on X: “Reuters has reported an object that attacked an AWS data center in the United Arab Emirates, causing a fire and shutting it down, was an Iranian drone attack, marking the first time that a commercial data center was physically targeted in a conflict.