Iranian Missiles Hit AWS Data Centers in Bahrain and Dubai
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- IRGC has conducted strikes against AWS sites in the Middle East since the start of the war in early March, with the Bahrain and Dubai facilities now declared "hard down" across multiple zones.
- AWS has three compute zones per site, and both the Bahrain and Dubai data centers are reporting a mix of "hard down" and "impaired but functioning" zones, with no timeline for returning to normal operations.
- Amazon told internal teams in a memo to scale services to the "minimal footprint required to support customer migration" and not expect normal levels of redundancy or resiliency in the two regions.
- Iran has also threatened to strike Nvidia, Microsoft, and other tech companies, and actually hit an Oracle data center in a later April strike, expanding the conflict's targets beyond AWS.
- The Strait of Hormuz route for oil and derivatives — including aluminum, helium, and LNG, all crucial inputs to the semiconductor supply chain — has been disrupted, threatening global chip production independent of the data center strikes.
- Tom's Hardware notes that even if the war ended immediately, physical infrastructure damage and supply chain disruption could take months or years to return to pre-war levels.
Why it matters: AWS has no timeline for restoring Bahrain and Dubai, meaning customers hosted there face an indefinite migration window during a war that's now expanded to strike Oracle and has threatened Nvidia and Microsoft. The semiconductor supply chain is simultaneously threatened by Strait of Hormuz disruptions to helium, aluminum, and LNG flows — so the conflict hits tech twice: through direct strikes on data centers and through the materials needed to build the hardware inside them.
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