𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿

On March 1 2026 Iranian strikes hit three AWS data centers. Two data centers were in the United Arab Emirates, and one was in Bahrain.

We've spent 15 years treating cloud resilience as a software problem. Availability zones, redundant power, auto-scaling, cross-region replication. Good engineering, all of it. But none of it was built with missiles in mind.

The UAE region has three availability zones. The strikes took out two. AWS's redundancy model survives the loss of a single zone, not a coordinated attack across multiple sites in the same region. The guarantee held on paper. It failed in practice.

Then everything started to fall. Careem, Snowflake, Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank all of these companies had problems. These companies did not ignore the importance of having multi-AZ but they still had issues. The problem was actually with the region, not just with the individual companies.

Iran's IRGC said it targeted the Bahrain facility specifically because AWS hosts U.S. military workloads. That boundary between commercial cloud and military infrastructure has been gone for years. Most of us just didn't think about what that means when the shooting starts.

The Red Sea has seventeen submarine cables that go through it. These cables carry most of the traffic between Europe and Asia and Africa. The Red Sea is having problems with the Houthi threats. This means that both of these areas the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are having big problems at the same time. The Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz have never had problems, like this before.

The companies with cross-region replication running recovered. The ones without it are still waiting.

Source: health.aws.amazon.com/h…