TL;DR
A month after Iranian drones struck AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, full recovery has not been declared and the facilities remain a live example of the IRGC's target list.
MSM Perspective
Reuters reported prolonged disruptions; BBC confirmed two UAE facilities were directly hit and one in Bahrain suffered proximity damage.
X Perspective
X accounts tracking infrastructure damage are mapping AWS's outage timeline as the proof-of-concept for the IRGC's broader corporate target strategy.
Amazon Web Services confirmed in early March that drone strikes damaged three of its data center facilities in the Middle East -- two in the United Arab Emirates hit directly and one in Bahrain damaged by a strike in close proximity. [1] The attacks, which occurred on March 1-2, caused structural damage, power disruptions, and in the UAE facilities, triggered fire suppression systems that produced additional water damage to server infrastructure. [2]
More than a month later, the AWS Health Dashboard continues to report intermittent service degradation in the me-central-1 and me-south-1 regions. [3] AWS has not declared full recovery. Reuters reported that the company expected the recovery timeline to be "prolonged due to physical damage" -- a phrase that acknowledges what the cloud industry had never before confronted: a sovereign military attacking commercial data infrastructure. [1]
The damage is no longer hypothetical context for the IRGC's March 31 target list naming 18 U.S. companies. It is precedent. Amazon's Bahrain facility was hit before the list was published. The list promises more of the same. [4]
-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing
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