Gulf Insider
Most people don’t think about what the “cloud” actually is. It’s a physical building full of servers storing everything from your medical records to your social media. Every Google search, every ChatGPT query, every hospital pulling up your health history routes through a data center. Right now, those buildings have about as much aerial protection as your local Costco. In March 2026, Iranian Shahed drones struck three AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. Multiple availability zones went down simultaneously, taking core services like EC2, S3, and Lambda offline, cascading outages to banks, payment platforms, and ride-hailing apps across the region. It was the first confirmed kinetic attack on a hyperscale data center run by a U.S. company. Shortly after, Iranian state media published a list of “Enemy Technology Infrastructure,” including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle facilities, painting targets on every major cloud provider in contested regions. Yes, the cloud is distributed. Workloads can fail over. But data still lives somewhere physical, and partial corruption or destruction can be devastating in ways a temporary outage doesn’t capture. Medical records, financial transactions, and AI training datasets are worth hundreds of millions. When those are gone, they’re gone. Global data center capex […]
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