Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare for the first time

Datacenters are becoming a target in warfare for the first time Iran is bombing Gulf datacenters to blow up symbols of alliance with the US – bringing the war directly into the lives of millions of people Sign up for the TechScape newsletter: our free technology email Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please forward it to someone you think would as well. The US-Israel war on Iran shows that datacenters are a new frontier in warfare Iran is bombing datacenters in the Persian Gulf to blow up symbols of the Gulf states’ technological alliance with the United States. Added bonus: they will be extremely costly to rebuild, being among the most expensive buildings in history. My colleague Daniel Boffey reports : It is believed to be a first: the deliberate targeting of a commercial datacent er by the armed forces of a country at war. At 4.30am on Sunday morning, an Iranian Shahed 136 drone struck an Amazon Web Services datacent er in the United Arab Emirates, setting off a devastating fire and forcing a shutdown of the power supply. Further damage was inflicted as attempts were made to suppress the flames with water. Soon after, a second datacent er owned by the US tech company was hit. Then a third was said to be in trouble, this time in Bahrain, after an Iranian suicide drone turned to fireball on striking land nearby. Iranian state TV has claimed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the attack “to identify the role of these cent ers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”. The coordinated strike had an immediate impact. Millions of people in Dubai and Abu Dhabi woke up on Monday unable to pay for a taxi, order a food delivery or check their bank balance on their mobile apps. Whether there was a military impact is unclear – but the strikes swiftly brought the war directly into the lives of 11 million people in the UAE, nine out of 10 of whom are foreign nationa...