Reports: Iran Missiles Hit AWS Cloud Site in Bahrain
Amazon Web Services' infrastructure has reportedly been hit in a strike by Iranian missiles, marking the first strike on a data centre following threats from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Tuesday, according to the Financial Times.
It follows a warning from IRGC, per Tasnim News Agency on X, to 18 US government and major tech firms, including the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple and Meta. The list did not include Amazon, but Iranian Shahed drones previously struck two AWS data centres in the United Arab Emirates on March 1.
Those attacks marked the first time a country has deliberately targeted commercial data centres during war time with a physical attack, according to the Independent.
Ongoing reports on service disruptions
Since the latest reported attack, AWS has been updating its service health dashboard detailing ongoing disruptions on the Bahrain-based data centre.
The first reports of the disruption to the AWS region in Bahrain were reported by the e-commerce giant last week, marking the second time in a month that its operations had been affected by the war.
Following the strike in March, the company reported that 73 services were impacted, with only 34 of these so far resolved as of 2 April.
In its latest update on the matter, it encouraged customers with workloads running in the Middle East to migrate to alternate AWS regions.
We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams.
With the immediate phase of this event now better understood, we are moving to a more targeted communication model.
Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions.
Targeting tech
AWS is also urging customers needing guidance on alternate regions to consider AWS Regions in the US, despite Iran's deliberate planned attacks on US tech companies.
CNBC reports that an IRGC-affiliated Telegram channel said 18 tech companies were being considered as "legitimate targets".
Presenters of the channel said: "From now on, for every assassination an American company will be destroyed."
An IRGC statement said: "These companies should expect the destruction of their respective units in exchange for each terror act in Iran, starting from 8pm Tehran time on Wednesday, April 1".
US government pledges action
Since Iran's threats on the 18 tech giants, the US State Department has warned all US citizens in Saudi Arabia to shelter as it monitors potential threats on Americans staying in the country.
The US Embassy in Saudi Arabia said in a travel advisory: "We are tracking reports of threats against locations where American citizens gather. We advise US citizens that hotels and other gathering points including US businesses and US educational institutions may be potential targets."
President Donald Trump also vowed to the nation in a televised speech at the White House on 2 April to strike Iran intensely.
He said: "Very shortly, we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks."
With the IRGC stating that "every assassination" will lead to the attack of an American company, there exists an exponential risk to hyperscale data centres like those built by AWS and cloud infrastructure companies.
