New satellite imagery confirms Iranian attack on Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain

Newly released satellite images appear to confirm Iran’s claim that it struck two Amazon Web Services data centers in Bahrain earlier in July, as Tehran makes good on its promise to strike commercial infrastructure in the Persian Gulf.

The images, originally published by state-affiliated media outlet Tasnim, show significant damage to two AWS data centers at Zallaq and Askar in Bahrain following an Iranian cruise missile attack. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it targeted both sites last week in retaliation for U.S. military strikes on the Darkhovin nuclear plant.

Bloomberg analysts reviewed a separate set of lower-resolution photos from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite constellation that appeared to confirm Iran’s claims.

Amazon has yet to confirm that the attack took place or that its sites suffered any damage. NewsNGR has reached out to the company for comment.

Amazon’s data centers have come under Iranian fire before. In March, an Iranian drone barrage hit three AWS data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Uptime Institute, an advisory body that evaluates data center performance and availability, wrote that the attack was the first confirmed military attack on a global cloud-computing provider.

The Bahrain centers were hit again in April after Iran announced that U.S.-based tech companies operating in the Middle East would be legitimate targets in the war. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry confirmed that its forces were responding to fires at the facility in early April.

It’s unclear if the U.S. was using the AWS centers for military or intelligence purposes when the sites were attacked this year. Fars News Agency, which maintains close ties with the IRGC, said in March that the attacks were conducted to identify how the centers support U.S. military operations.

Some analysts have described Iran’s targeting of commercial data centers as a new front in war.

“The March strikes marked a genuine shift. Commercial cloud facilities were never designed to sit inside a kinetic threat environment, and now they are being treated as legitimate military targets. That changes the security conversation for the whole industry,” Laurynas Satas, CEO of Aktyvus Photonics, a defense technology company developing laser-based precision targeting systems for NATO, said in a statement.

Mr. Satas added that companies such as Amazon Web Services should learn to defend themselves against drones and coordinate missile defense with state militaries.