During the first weeks, the war left an ambiguous feeling. Digital infrastructure was affected, yes, but it could still seem accidental. In recent days, that doubt has disappeared.
Confirmation came through facts, not statements.
At the beginning of March, drones directly struck three AWS data centers in the region: two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain.
There were fires, power losses, cooling failures, and critical services were degraded or went offline for hours. But what mattered was not the immediate damage, it was what came next.
Because those attacks did not stop at the first impact. In recent days, new missile attacks have once again affected AWS infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving several zones in a “hard down” state, completely out of service. And most importantly, there is no clear recovery timeline.
This completely changes the scenario. Until now, the cloud model was based on one premise: there is always another zone available. But when multiple zones fail due to the same cause, a physical conflict, that premise no longer holds. In fact, these attacks have called into question one of the fundamental principles of cloud computing: the independence of availability zones.
For the first time, redundancy has not been enough, forcing something that was previously exceptional: urgent migrations out of the region..
AWS has recommended that customers move workloads to other geographies in response to an “unpredictable” environment. That is the turning point, because from there, the problem stops being local and becomes global.
But data centers are not the only target—they never have been. They are part of something larger.
In parallel with these attacks, the war has intensified strikes on energy infrastructure across the region, and this has a direct consequence: energy does not disappear, it becomes unstable. And a data center does not need to lose power to fail—it only needs to be unable to rely on it.
Generators running beyond expected limits, increasing dependence on fuel, rising operational costs, and above all, loss of predictability.
But the next layer of the problem lies elsewhere out of sight. In recent days, Iran has threatened to act on submarine cables in the Gulf and the Red Sea. No massive cuts have been confirmed, but that is not the point. What matters is that these cables have become part of the conflict—and that changes everything. Because we are not talking about local infrastructure; we are talking about routes through which global digital traffic flows: finance, cloud, enterprise communications. And unlike a data center, they cannot be quickly restored.
Experts warn that disruptions to these systems could take months to resolve. Meanwhile, another layer has come into play: the digital one.
Since the beginning of the conflict, cyber operations have accompanied physical attacks, disrupting networks, communications, and control systems. Not as the main attack, but as an enabler. First the system is degraded, then it is hit. It is a pattern, and that pattern is repeating. Because what has become clear in recent days is that data centers are not the final target—they are a node within a system.
A system that depends on:
- Energy.
- Connectivity.
- Operational stability.
If those three fail, the data center may still be standing, but it ceases to be reliable—and in the digital world, that is enough. The most important aspect of this phase of the conflict has not been a massive global outage. It has been something deeper: the confirmation of a paradigm shift.
For the first time, commercial cloud infrastructure has been physically targeted. For the first time, redundancy has failed in the face of a geopolitical event. For the first time, digital infrastructure has ceased to be neutral. It is no longer around the war. It is inside it.
Sources
• InfoQ (2026) — attacks on multiple AWS data centers and redundancy failure
• The Network DNA (2026) — physical damage to AWS facilities (UAE and Bahrain)
• Tom’s Hardware (2026) — full zone outages (“hard down”)
• Rest of World (2026) — workload migration and connectivity risks
• Asia Times / Deccan Herald (2026) — data centers as strategic targets
• Wikipedia / informes técnicos — cyberattacks and network degradation