Dubai: Amazon announced on Monday that sparks and fires broke out at its data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates after objects struck the buildings, but did not directly blame the hostilities in the Middle East, with both countries targeted by attacks. Amazon's cloud unit data centers in the two countries are currently facing severe power and connectivity issues. Two physical clusters of data centers in the UAE on Monday suffered complete power outages.

According to Anadolu Agency, Amazon did not explicitly link the incident to ongoing Iranian missile strikes. Shanaka Anslem Perera, a tech analyst, said on X that Amazon is opting to call missile or drone debris 'objects' because there is a lack of jargon for this kind of scenario, namely the first time a giant cloud service provider's data center was hit during a war. Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity expert, echoed the sentiment on X, stating that the description of the incident was gentle, marking the first time an 'availability zone' became unavailable due to ballistic reasons.

Olejnik noted that Amazon's UAE data center went completely offline overnight from Saturday to Sunday. While Amazon Web Services (AWS), the tech giant's cloud subsidiary, informed its users of the fires, it still did not clarify what objects struck the infrastructure. Olejnik added that connecting the dots was left to the reader, with services expected to return in 'multiple hours.'

Levent Eraslan, a social media expert at Trkiye's Anadolu University and founder of the NGO Sodimer, commented on X that Iran's targeting of AWS infrastructure demonstrated that the war expanded beyond the military field and entered the digital infrastructure. He emphasized that data centers, cloud systems, and digital networks hold strategic importance comparable to energy facilities or military bases. Eraslan suggested that such a move could be seen as an asymmetric cyber power message against American tech infrastructure, highlighting data and infrastructure control as critical frontiers of war in the digital age.