I'm surprised this reportedly only affected 19 server racks. Some of the small FPV quadcopter strikes I've seen videos of have collapsed entire homes. Even if the structure is more resilient than a fragile home, I would have expected the blast from a larger long-range drone like a Shahed to damage more server racks than that.
Yea it's hard to reconcile such a small number of affected racks with such a widespread impact though, so this must not be the whole story. They're talking about a half a year to restore the data center. It must be more than a roof repair and 19 racks.
Data centers are such great targets in modern warfare. A few cheap drones can inflict billions in damage with low direct casualties (if the attacker even cares). I have heard AWS in particular is secretive about the exact location of their data centers, but no doubt every major country knows exactly where they are.
They are not widely publicized but they cannot be entirely secret because when you use AWS Direct Connect you need to know where to do the work in. Not every AWS datacenter has Direct Connect, but any OSS intel person could do the work required. When you have sufficient incentive to know where (for instance, trading crypto) you will find out the difference between, say, a matching engine running in AWS's datacenter run by AT Tokyo or by Colt.
AWS does not publicize all of their stuff, true, but they have partner documentation, their partners are proud to be vendors to Amazon and will advertise, and there are old unlisted PDFs on the Internet. Besides, Amazon has thousands of employees and contractors and their families. This kind of thing is within reach of any human being with sufficient interest.
Modern warfare mostly targets military weapons: missiles against missiles… or financial weapons: oil price steering. Lawyers pens against lawyer pens. even military casualties are avoided. There is 0 appetite for senseless destruction of civilian infrastructure. You are thinking ww1,ww2 which are not modern anymore.
When I was working at AWS, which was a new service at the time, the example we often heard was a natural disaster or comet strike; would be what we were making our data centers redundant for. I don't think we were ever considered to be targeted during war and I'm sure they considered that they just didn't want to that affect that morale cost on the staff.
Three availability zones provides no protection against three ballistic missiles.
Region pairs are similarly totally ineffective against a mere six rockets.
No current missile defence system is effective against ballistic warheads reentering from space at hypersonic velocities.
Colocating thousands of businesses and hundreds of government agencies into a handful of hyperscale data centres is the text book definition of putting all of one’s eggs into a single basket.
If Iran’s attacks were more coordinated[1] they would have taken out all zones of every Middle East AWS, Azure, and GCP region. On top of the obvious direct damage to GCC nations it could have very likely permanently damaged the reputations of public clouds, possibly causing trillions in indirect economic damage to the United States.
[1] The theory is that the Iranian regime prepared for decapitation strikes by splitting their military into about thirty cells that can act independently.
Iran's Navy, Air Force, power plants, hospitals, colleges, universities and most importantly little girl's schools were obliterated in the first 42 minutes of Trump's war.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 35.7 ms ] threadAWS does not publicize all of their stuff, true, but they have partner documentation, their partners are proud to be vendors to Amazon and will advertise, and there are old unlisted PDFs on the Internet. Besides, Amazon has thousands of employees and contractors and their families. This kind of thing is within reach of any human being with sufficient interest.
Region pairs are similarly totally ineffective against a mere six rockets.
No current missile defence system is effective against ballistic warheads reentering from space at hypersonic velocities.
Colocating thousands of businesses and hundreds of government agencies into a handful of hyperscale data centres is the text book definition of putting all of one’s eggs into a single basket.
If Iran’s attacks were more coordinated[1] they would have taken out all zones of every Middle East AWS, Azure, and GCP region. On top of the obvious direct damage to GCC nations it could have very likely permanently damaged the reputations of public clouds, possibly causing trillions in indirect economic damage to the United States.
[1] The theory is that the Iranian regime prepared for decapitation strikes by splitting their military into about thirty cells that can act independently.
or, that is what they tell you.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/01/trump-congress-war-...
Now, about those fuel prices...
Iran's Navy, Air Force, power plants, hospitals, colleges, universities and most importantly little girl's schools were obliterated in the first 42 minutes of Trump's war.