[HN Gopher] Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones "Hard D...
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Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones "Hard Down" in Bahrain
and Dubai
Author : upofadown
Score : 63 points
Date : 2026-04-03 21:25 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bigtechnology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bigtechnology.com)
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| if you dont colo your own servers you don't own anything.
| stavros wrote:
| Why would I want to own a cut-off datacenter in Dubai?
| xoa wrote:
| > _if you dont colo your own servers you don 't own anything._
|
| I'm confused, what does ownership have to do with this
| particular failure mode? The issue here is a (for many)
| unforeseen new tradeoff involved in centralization. Colocating
| at a central place has the exact same tradeoff in this case:
| bandwidth is vastly more available and cheaper towards the
| core, and there are significant amortization gains to be had
| with a lot of basic shared infra. But it's also one big
| structure holding a lot of computers and infra everyone is
| depending on, that's the whole point of it! We're all sharing
| network backbone and power filtering/redundancy and so on and
| so forth, vs paying for that separately. That means a missile
| or drone or bomb hit to the building still hits all of us
| whether we own the servers there or we're running workloads on
| someone else's servers.
|
| The only responses are either central counter measures or
| decentralization. Both have significant costs and complexity,
| that's why it wasn't just done proactively right?
| indolering wrote:
| I think it's a joke: you REALLY don't want to own your own
| servers.
| lta wrote:
| I don't think it is. There are many many cases where you do
| want to own them. The people you rent yours from are making
| a shit load of money so it doesn't sound that bad of an
| idea
| sophacles wrote:
| I buy lots of things from people who make a pile of money
| from low margin goods/services sheerly on scale. There
| are many things i could not reproduce more cheaply from
| constituent parts, even if i value my time at $0.
|
| This includes things I have experise in.
| brianwawok wrote:
| It sometimes makes financial sense to own your own servers
| postepowanieadm wrote:
| Your servers also may get hit with a bomb/missle.
| pvtmert wrote:
| I don't think co-locating with AWS or any other DC in Middle-
| East would help in this case. Unless you bring your own missile
| defence network, you are vulnerable.
|
| In the case of if you could bring your own missile-defence-
| network, then you probably don't need co-location anyway.
| (There is nothing "co", it's just location you build & operate,
| with your Patriot or whatever)
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| boolean "you are vulnerable" means nothing, because it's
| always True
|
| spreading out decreases risk, concentration increases it
| legitster wrote:
| You should have the opposite takeaway - if you don't have
| redundancy in the cloud you don't actually have uptime.
| sva_ wrote:
| I didn't know they had strong workers rights/union culture down
| there to strike.
| xoa wrote:
| This may have been long discussed, but I feel like this war is
| the first time I've really thought hard about how big a target
| data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war and how
| that's an entirely new thing since the last time it was really on
| the radar (end of CW) right? We've built trillions and trillions
| of dollars in infrastructure in the peace time since, and it
| seems fairly concentrated. AWS is amongst the biggest there is,
| and according to mappers like [0] there are only around 240
| operational total worldwide with another 130ish under
| construction. Like, in one respect that seems like a bunch, but
| vs the kind of attacks we see done in a matter of days in modern
| wars it's a pretty small number for the whole planet isn't it? In
| the first 24 hours of the war the US and Israel launched on Iran,
| they hit something like 1500-2000 targets. How hardened are the
| data centers? Are they in structures that handle some level of
| explosives? Do they have counter measures like internal blast
| walls dividing things into cells so a few hundred pounds of high
| explosive in one area doesn't damage outside the cell? I mean, of
| course like all data centers they'll have considered extensive
| countermeasures to fire, environmental threats, grid issues and
| so on. But has "nation-state level attack via mass drones or
| bombardment" been part of the threat model over the last few
| decades? Hardening of telecoms was certainly considered for old
| Ma Bell and such back in the CW days but that was a very
| different environment.
|
| I guess it makes me think about what a soft underbelly this could
| be for a lot of modern society. There's always been consideration
| of threats to refineries and power stations and industrial
| production and all those big metal deals. But like, forget any
| sort of nuclear exchange, any sort of crazy super Starfish style
| big EMP, just purely a few thousand drones nailing data centers.
| Nobody even directly dies, just a lot of wrecked computers. What
| _would_ be the cost of losing all the clouds and colo stuff? How
| long to replace, at what cost? How much depends on it?
|
| ----
|
| 0: https://www.datacentermap.com/c/amazon-aws/
| asdff wrote:
| The way everything is so overleveraged on the success of these
| companies being packed into ETFs, it would probably take down
| the whole economy. You'd be able to shut down even more
| manufacturing without even destroying it just from economic
| forces. That is unless the US responds by nationalizing
| everything, which they won't. They'd rather it go to
| smithereens so someone has a chance to be made wildly rich
| rebuilding.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > the first time I've really thought hard about how big a
| target data centers would be in any sort of modern peer war
|
| Given the rapid and increasing rise of AI use in actually
| fighting wars, I suspect data centers won't just be a big
| target, they will eventually be the #1 priority target. Taking
| them offline won't just be of interest in terms of economic
| damage, it will be a direct strategic goal toward militarily
| winning the conflict.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually fighting
| wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk of never
| being able to leave their own country again for fear of
| prosecution for war crimes, I'm not so sure that the "rapid
| and increasing rise" is going to actually be a thing.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Until it is clear that the use of AI in "actually
| fighting wars" doesn't put senior military people at risk
| of never being able to leave their own country again for
| fear of prosecution for war crimes
|
| I don't believe that's a real concern that the senior
| military people have anymore. War crimes are legal in 2026.
| That ship has sailed (and was double tap struck by the US
| Navy). Nobody is doing anything about it.
| edgyquant wrote:
| War crimes have never been anything more than a way the
| west can punish its enemies. It's hilarious people think
| this norm continuing is some refutation of the system as
| designed.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > War crimes have never been anything more than a way the
| west can punish its enemies
|
| That's a fair point, the major change isn't that we
| suddenly started committing war crimes, it is that we've
| dropped all pretenses of trying to justify why what we
| did isn't one.
| propagandist wrote:
| The Hague Invasion Act takes care of that.
| 49287 wrote:
| If they hit AI data centers, 50% of software developers will
| convert to Islam. :)
| mooreds wrote:
| Don't forget underseas cables:
| https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
| tristanj wrote:
| Instead of targeting data centers, it's far easier to target
| the electrical substation that powers the datacenter. It's
| relatively simple to do. Transformers require oil to cool
| themselves, and if the coolant reservoir is damaged, then they
| overheat and shut off. This exact infrastructure attack
| occurred in North Carolina in 2022 [0], where someone fired
| bullets into the coolant reservoirs and caused a several day
| power outage. The perpetrator was never caught. It's speculated
| a foreign actor did this to gauge the response in a future
| wartime scenario.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
| xoa wrote:
| > _Instead of targeting data centers, it 's far easier to
| target the electrical substation that powers the datacenter_
|
| That has a lot of collateral damage that may or may not be
| desirable though. Simultaneously it might have quite a
| different long term effect right? If all the actual computers
| are unharmed they can be powered in other ways in an
| emergency, even if at much higher cost. Or powered back up
| later, the time lost might be militarily very significant but
| they're not gone.
|
| But how many people and companies actually have full
| functional decentralized clones of all programs and data? How
| many people and companies have devices that are locked to
| remote hosts they expect to check in on at least once in
| awhile even if they're not "cloud dependent"? What if all
| that was literally _gone_ , a few thousand missiles or drones
| and data centers are all just completely erased including
| tape backups, everything, suddenly we're in a world where all
| that compute and data is poof. And without hurting anything
| else, no traditional war crimes either, no power or direct
| food or transport disruptions. Everyone is fine and healthy,
| except with this huge societal exocortex gone.
| stygiansonic wrote:
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
|
| (Perpetrators also not caught)
| pvtmert wrote:
| Agreed that Govt/Military runs on AWS/Azure/whatever. They care
| about "security" in a "virtual" sense, but I presume soon we'll
| see requirements like: "Must Have: Missile Defence Perimeter"
| next to the "Must be FIPS compliant".
| dgxyz wrote:
| My partner works in that space.
|
| Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US
| centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical
| risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one
| operational risk now.
| trhway wrote:
| >We've built trillions and trillions of dollars in
| infrastructure in the peace time since, and it seems fairly
| concentrated.
|
| and thus is easily defended. It would be a pocket change - tens
| of millions - for AMZN to put say a Rheinmetall Skyshield
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyshield at the data center.
| afiori wrote:
| Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have
| been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am
| unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably
| protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
| nostrademons wrote:
| In any significant war the Internet is going to go down. That's
| what has happened empirically in countries undergoing
| significant wars or social unrest, like Russia, Iran, Yemen,
| Ethiopia, Syria, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. While IP packet
| routing itself may have been designed to survive a nuclear war,
| there have been many centralized systems built on top of it
| (DNS? Edge caching? Cloudflare? Big Tech) that are essential to
| the functioning of what we know of as the Internet.
|
| If your threat model includes war and you want to have some of
| the conveniences of the Internet, you should make plans for how
| to host local copies of data and develop local-scale
| communications for the people you regularly talk with. The
| Internet is too big of a security and propaganda risk for
| governments to allow it to continue to exist when they are
| engaged in a real existential war.
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(page generated 2026-04-03 23:00 UTC)