As the Iran–US war grinds into its fifth month, cruise missiles and drones have found a new class of target: the physical infrastructure powering Amazon Web Services in Bahrain and the UAE — exposing how modern conflict now reaches deep into the cloud.
Five months into an escalating conflict with the United States, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has extended its campaign beyond tankers and military bases to a new kind of target: the physical infrastructure behind Amazon Web Services. Repeated drone and missile strikes on AWS facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have knocked out cloud capacity across the region, offering a stark illustration of how digital infrastructure has become a front line in modern warfare.
Internet in Iran Still Not Fully Restored
Starting on May 26, Cloudflare Radar detected the first signs of the previously announced restoration of internet access in Iran—marking the provisional end of an 88-day blackout that had left the country almost completely cut off from the internet since February 28. On May 27, Cloudflare Radar recorded that traffic had recovered to 40% of pre-blackout levels—a partial reopening. This is consistent with reports that access was restored selectively rather than all at once. Since then, HTTP traffic volume has risen to as high as 90% before settling back to about 59% of pre-block levels. This volume corresponds to the traffic Cloudflare observed in February, a period between this most recent block and an earlier one in January. This suggests that connectivity has returned to a level similar to that just before the block, rather than having fully normalized.
Attacks on Data Centers
For its part, Iran began drone attacks on AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain in March 2026. Drone activity damaged AWS facilities in the UAE, with a nearby site in Bahrain also affected, triggering power outages and service disruptions. By April, continued attacks had pushed Amazon to place its Middle East cloud regions into hard-down status and advise customers to migrate workloads elsewhere. AWS confirmed at the time that its me-central-1 region in the UAE had suffered damage from the regional conflict and could no longer reliably support customer applications, according to the company. Network telemetry from Cloudflare Radar corroborated the outage, showing HTTP traffic to the region remaining persistently low in the following weeks — a downstream signature of physical damage rather than a routine network fault.
The most serious incident came in July, when the IRGC said it had struck AWS’s central data infrastructure at the Zalak facility in Bahrain with cruise missiles, claiming to have destroyed it, according to Fars, an IRGC-linked media outlet. Independent conflict monitors and satellite imagery reportedly corroborated visible damage at the site, though Amazon and Bahraini authorities did not immediately confirm the extent of the destruction. Iranian officials framed the strikes as retaliation for earlier U.S. attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, arguing that the data hubs support American and allied military operations in the region. AWS has acknowledged regional service disruptions and said it deployed round-the-clock teams to secure remaining infrastructure, while largely declining to comment on specific military strikes.
The attacks on cloud infrastructure form one strand of a wider war that resumed after President Donald Trump declared the earlier ceasefire “over,” triggering ten consecutive nights of U.S. strikes on Iran aimed at degrading its capacity to threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Traffic through the strait, which normally carries roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, fell sharply as vessels switched off their transponders, even as the Trump administration maintained the waterway remained open under military escort. Oil prices climbed accordingly, with Brent crude breaking above ninety dollars a barrel for the first time in more than a month.
Analysts describe the resulting standoff as one of mutual limits. The United States has expended a significant share of its Tomahawk and Jassm cruise missile stockpiles, and its Patriot interceptor reserves have been depleted by roughly half, according to estimates from the CSIS think tank, raising questions about how long Washington can sustain strikes while also defending its bases in the Gulf. Iran, for its part, has demonstrated it can keep enough missile and drone capability intact to threaten commercial shipping and, evidently, cloud infrastructure, without needing to defeat American forces outright. That asymmetry, one Middle East expert argued, has already shifted Iran’s own definition of victory from mere survival to something closer to leverage over the strait.
Whether that leverage will hold is another matter. Iran’s economy, already strained by years of sanctions, has absorbed an estimated 150 to 270 billion dollars in war damage, and observers caution that Tehran cannot rebuild without an eventual settlement with Washington. For now, though, the conflict’s reach into cloud data centers underscores a broader shift: critical digital infrastructure, long treated as a civilian backbone insulated from the battlefield, is increasingly being targeted as a strategic asset in its own right.
The risk is not confined to the Strait of Hormuz. Houthi forces in Yemen, allied with Tehran, have widened their own campaign in the Red Sea, declaring a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia and striking a refinery in the Saudi city of Jizan, threatening the pipeline route Riyadh has used to bypass Hormuz. A simultaneous disruption of both chokepoints, one regional security fellow warned, would be catastrophic for the global economy. For enterprises that relied on AWS’s Gulf regions, the lesson has already landed: cloud resilience planning now has to account not only for hardware failures and natural disasters, but for the possibility that a data center becomes a battlefield target. Customers with workloads in me-central-1 or Bahrain have spent recent months migrating to alternative regions, a costly and disruptive process that few architecture reviews anticipated even a year ago. Whether the current pause in U.S. strikes holds into the autumn, or whether hostilities resume as they have twice before, will determine how much further that migration has to run.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de