An adjoining substation to BAH53 had one of it's two main buildings damaged/destroyed about 2026-07-16 per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-data-center-power-substation-bahrain-jul-16th-2026-142024
Then about 2026-07-22 BAH53 itself was damaged/destroyed per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-services-bahrain-jul-22nd-2026-142112
Possibly the least defended of the three sites as there is no air/missile defence battery in between this site and Iran.
No media reports about this data centre being attacked previously. Possibly the safest of the three as there are at least two (probably three) air/missile defence batteries in between this site and Iran.
Apparently the Batelco DC.1 data centre adjoining (and apparently critical to) BAH55 was damaged/destroyed about 2026-04-01 per https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk28nj0lrjo _or_ the adjoining substation to these two facilities was damaged/destroyed -- news articles are hard to follow as to what exactly might have been damaged and the extent of damage caused.
Middle ground for defence with one or two (maybe three) air/missile defence batteries between this site and Iran, depending on where drones/missiles are launched from.
If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.
Update: IRGC published satellite imagery a few hours ago showing an impact to BAH54, apparently impacted on 2026-07-24, alongside another undated image before the impact. From a quick comparison of both images with reliable satellite imagery sources (e.g. WV02 image dated 2025-02-21 on ESRI World Imagery Wayback) there are no obvious signs of image manipulation, with roof features and surrounding buildings/other features lining up as expected. Additionally the claimed post-strike image adds a significant number of vehicles to the site (when there are usually close to none present), which may correspond to fire fighting vehicles expected to be monitoring the site afterwards. Further, Sentinel-2 imagery from 2026-07-24 shows a dark patch (blast damage) on the roof of BAH54 per https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=18&lat=26.0509...
> If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain
I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
> It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
I think the two kinds of attacks are so different that they require different defenses.
Drones need not fly in straight lines. Data centers need ventilation, providing a path for drones. Putting grids in a ventilation shaft will stop the first drone, but a coordinated attack will use one drone to blow up defenses and a second/third/etc one to reach the target
Upon checking Sentinel-2 imagery for BAH55 from 2026-03-29 to 2026-04-13 (and all later imagery) there is also visible blast damage to the roof of BAH55, which would correspond in timing to media reports about damage caused about 2026-04-01. Sentinel-2 imagery appears to clarify AWS' claim of "while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities" to mean a direct impact to the building. However it seems likely from high resolution satellite imagery of BAH55 that the machinery rooms of the building perhaps took most of the damage, perhaps leaving data halls in a better shape elsewhere in the building (but possibly still unusable due to water/smoke damage).
It's sad but also interesting that in someone's disaster recovery plan now they need to add a line item about analyzing which datacenters are behind air defenses.
Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587
There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.
The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.
Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.
It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.
As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.
> Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.
Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".
There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.
I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.
These feel quite different. IRGC attacked Amazon compute. Ukraine attacked several warehouses. Comparing Wildberries to Amazon is also only half the truth. Wildberries is directly part of russian war machine as soldiers need to buy essential dual-use equipment there and they even sell weapons.
I suspect in both cases the primary motivation is "there's a huge box full of expensive stuff and if we get a drone inside the whole box burns to the ground".
Datacenters are full of metal. Warehouses are full of cardboard boxes and styrofoam.
A rack of 14 $5k servers is worth $70k. A half-pallet stacked two meters high with $50 rubber dicks, each in a 30x10x10 cm box, is worth around $24k, and has the same form factor. There are more expensive servers but there are also more expensive products.
But large data centers would be maybe 10k square meters in one building, while the largest building of the Elektrostal Wildberries warehouse was over 150k sqm.
A datacenter, if successfully and completely burned down, would of course cause disruption (although in a well designed redundant system it shouldn't), but doing so is harder and burning down a major logistics hub causes disruption too.
The warehouse also leaves a hard to deny, widely visible reminder to the population that the war has consequences, in the form of a Moscow-sized smoke cloud: https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=33.290517136221574,5... (plus endless videos of small sellers lamenting their fate).
Hitting the enemy where it hurts. It's much more effective to hurt Russian morale by making big explosions and petrol rain from striking a refinery or stopping/delaying shipments to the front line than by shutting down a center where a handful of people work and that won't directly impact the war. Ukraine must making fighting painful enough that the Russians withdraw, because the math of attrition favors the much more populous and richer Russians long term.
the point of hitting them is to cause commercial damage to american companies. In reality, this changes little in terms of US capacity. Doing the equivalent of this to Russia would be attacking their oil ports and infrastructure.
wildberries has been taken over by an oligarch and the only powers in Russia that Putin may hear are the oligarchs. There will be no 'overthrow of Putin' in Russia because there is no institutional support and it is well understood by literate people - a revolution is not just a disorganized uprising on the streets (what happens the next day? - return to normal) it requires years of planning and support.
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
The civilization in which you are a part of, this very mass that is greater than you and I, is evolving and changing. How can there not be new unique headlines?
I feel for both, people who where hosting there not expecting this war and this attack and the attackers, because they didn't attack just because they wanted but attacked as a response as stated earlier.
Bahrain hosts bases that the US uses to attack Iran, and Amazon is part of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program that provides the DoD with cloud services.
Bahrain is host to the headquarters of the US fifth fleet, a notable US airbase, and thousands of US military personnel. These assets are being used to attack Iran.
The article has actual quotations on Iran's justification: this is in response to a recent US attack on civilian infrastructure (an under-construction Iranian nuclear powerplant with no nuclear material present)
What do you mean? It is very clear that Trump declared war on Iran. That's factual.
Civilian damage occurs all the time - often on purpose (infrastructure), sometimes not directly on purpose (drones getting off-target for various reasons, that also happens and not all of this is on purpose). What Iran does here is increase the cost of waging warfare against it, to make continuation of war as unappealing as possible. To claim the nearby countries are "uninvolved" while hosting military bases or providing targeting data to the USA is just propaganda. Why would you insinuate this? It is clearly an incorrect statement. One can debate whether targeting amazon is useful or not, but definitely you don't have an uninvolved country here, so much is clear. Besides, all companies of a given country at war, need to provide data and money anyway.
Not “wrongly flagged dead”, insta-dead because commenter is a consistent shit-poster. Put down the history book and read the comment history. If you feel strongly about it, vouch for the comment instead of reposting.
Was there really no other source than "houseofsaud.com" here? Seems like a strange source to be promoting on HackerNews. Their About, Contact, and Press pages don't even work. I can not find who owns this publication.
It does seem like we'd be better off with a more neutral source, but the only other article I could find from today (as opposed to 3 days ago) was https://iranwire.com/en/news/155401-irgc-claims-second-strik..., which doesn't look (or sound) like a neutral source either.
As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.
They are certainly LLM-generated. I'm sure it's been done, but I would love to see a comprehensive look into what it is exactly that makes a UI seem LLM-generated.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Lack of visual hierarchy. Lots of use of bold text to make numbers stand out, without bolding the corresponding labels. Reliance on heavily-saturated primary colors. Limited attention paid to alignment.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
> I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.
They're definitely Claude generated. People at my last company loved to generate pages & stat cards with Claude and they all had this exact same style.
My annoyance is that it's hard to figure out if it's actually up-to-date or not. If you click "Live conflict timeline →" it brings you to a collection of pages not updated since April (and at different points in April, oddly). The date count seems right, the oil price might have been correct when it was published but isn't "live" despite being labeled that way.
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in the Ukraine war, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
- Both require widely-separated resource opportunities. For whales, seasonally-abundant food such as krill or fish; for cargo, large-scale production and consumption of goods separated by water.
- Both require comparative safety from predators. Large adult whales have virtually no natural predators (orcas being a notable exception), until human whaling grew in scale largely since the 1500s and accelerating greatly through the 19th and 20th centuries, during which whole populations where annihilated. Maritime shipping depends on a lack of piracy or hostile naval warfare, with tremendous losses to traffic being seen during the 1st and 2nd World Wars in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
Highly-centralised or choreographed logistics chains are also fragile and subject to disruption. During WWII, the Soviet Union was initially inclined to One Big Dump supply depots, possibly a hallmark of centralised planning. These proved attractive targets and quite harmful to ongoing operations, and over the course of the war much more decentralised patterns emerged, or so I dimly recall from long-ago reading. Decentralised operations are integral to much guerilla / asymmetric warfare by the inferior party.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who naively thought he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
They aren't neutral either. They're hosting military bases and miilitary assets that are being used to attack them. They are allowing their airspace to be used. Same with their waters and ports.
Which is to say that all the military assets in Gulf countries, including this Amazon DC, are valid military targets.
The Gulf States are in fact military rivals and cold adversaries of Iran; Iran vs. the Gulf States is a more salient geopolitical conflict than Iran vs. Israel. Iran has, through the IRGC, been in hot wars with the Gulf States in the last 10 years.
At least some of them, it depends on who you ask (Simferopol). But I had been using Ukraine as a shorthand for the conflict, so editing it to be clearer
Which reminds me: a friend made a wild mulberry pie yesterday with some dried mulberries shipped in from Chernobyl a year ago. He set it to cool overnight but when he checked in early morning and cut a slice, he found some of the berries glowed in the dark.
His quandary: should he eat it anyway? Seems like the radiation should be minimal, after all. Or maybe wait until this next Wednesday when he has a stomach x-ray and eat a small slice just beforehand to confound his primary care physician (they are both great practical jokers!)?
> How long will it take to rebuild those datacenters given the supply shortage?
Amazon will already have quite a lot of hardware queued up for new datacenter builds and expansions, some of that will presumably be redirected to this project once folks stop chucking missiles around. They also pride themselves on the speed of new datacenter rollout - even if they have to bulldoze the site and start from scratch, I doubt it takes as long as a year.
As someone who has lived most of his life in Iran, I ask those who find any alignment with the IRGC to please understand that it is a religiously fanatic military and terrorist group.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
Iranian here, I have no love for the IRGC but I am glad they are keeping Americans from destroying our country right now.
We don't need Americans to "save us", we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues. It would be great if the West started respecting the sovereignty of other nations.
I have a hard time sympathizing with the Pahlavi supporters cheering the bombing of our home.
My comment wasn’t about the West saving us, nor was it about supporting Pahlavi (which I personally did, but of course I’m against the continued bombing of my country).
What I’m saying is that supporting one of the biggest terrorist group in the world by the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a grave mistake. It legitimizes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reasons behind the current situation in Iran and some other bad situations in the region.
If you are an Iranian, you know what IRGC has done and keep doing, how good they are at propaganda and how nothing is beyond them including killing (and worse) anyone anywhere in the name of their god.
I don't know if you realize - but the Americans have offered IRGC a pretty generous deal that essentially removes almost all sanctions in return to stop developing nukes, and the IRGC itself is escalating the situation, which could force America to bomb Iran again.
> we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues
This seems counterfactual, unless you called the regime for which you state you «have no love for» "satisfactory" or its length "insignificant".
> we have 90M intelligent people
This is also a pretty unbelievable claim - were it so, I and many others would move to Iran immediately. Can we say you are not being literally factual?
I don't care about Iran's leadership and think this shouldn't be the US's war to fight. Also, we aren't even trying to replace their government, we're just attacking per Israel's wishes. There must be a lot of Americans who agree.
Israel's leader is wanted by the international court for genocide. And lets not forget how Iran's current government took power? US installed a dictator in Iran because UK was angry that Iran nationalized the UK owned oil fields. This led to a coup, which resulted in the current Iranian government.
There's no good guys. Why is the US even there?
Edit: downvoted to -3. Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
No-one in their right mind wants to support IRGC. But, to see an egotistic, deranged, clown and the entire circus getting slapped in the face, is very satisfying to watch.
Yes true, but also anyone in Iran no matter what part your from wants the US gone in the region. The US is seen as responsible for allowing slavery in many golf states. It's also responsible for unfair businesses. And seen as a mafia state that steals resources.
And what happened before then? Iran had a secular prime minister, Mossadegh, but the UK and US supported, among others, conservative clerics to overthrow that elected government to put in a dictatorship.
Then in the 1970s the CIA provided SAVAK with the names of secular left opposition to arrest and execute.
So spare me talk about foreigners supporting religious fanatics, the western establishment did so for decades.
I for one don't want my tax dollars used to bomb schools in Iran.
This is absolutely 100% true, which is why deliberately destroying all the pre-existing structural deterrents to their bad behavior was such a disaster.
Iran did bad things, but not as much as they could. Now they're doing more bad things and we can't stop them.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
I totally agree with most of what you’ve said. The only part I disagree with is the whitewashing of what the IRGC has done across the region for years. Dismissing or minimizing its actions/impact simply because we also oppose other bad actors is, imo, a critical mistake.
It's interesting that Cuba, Iran, and even Venezuela all took as part of their identity some sort of adversarial position with the United States (although Venezuela was post-Chavez). The US is currently treating them, to some degree at their word at this point.
Whereas you could look at a place like Vietnam that fought its war and moved on, Trump's focus is largely dealing with actors that never did. I suspect the Saudi's won't be the only Nuclear deal signed. So much of this is just the cold war extended, but with North Korea and Iran trying to work their way past non-proliferation. The natural response would also be to arm South Korea and possibly Japan. All of which would have been the West's natural response to non-proliferation being violated.
I get the perception, but much of this is decades in the making and almost everyone involved including the US should have sued for peace years ago. Actual peace. Not, "we're not firing rockets but Israel can't exist."
I doubt you'll find many people here who are in alignment with a bigoted and criminal regime such as Iran's and its military.
What may be misinterpreted as sympathy for them is sympathy for the suffering Iranians, and antipathy for the criminal and bigoted US foreign policy especially in the Middle East. This did not start with Trump's recent idiotic game; Iran's only democratically elected president so far was toppled in 1953 by the CIA at the request of Churchill, because they felt Iran's oil does not belong to the Iranian people but to British Petroleum.
> The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. Sahih Muslim 2922
When they're surrounded on every side by people who devote their lives to Hadith such as these, I can't blame them. Their enemies set up bases under hospitals, schools. Their wives and children are human shields. I think they're doing pretty well with the situation they've been handed. The situation is more complex than "They're firing on civilian populations", because their enemy fights in civilian clothing, and hides in civilian crowds. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place and are doing what they can to survive.
The Iranian regime killed in a matter of days approximately the same amount of civilians as the IDF killed in Gaza over the course of their entire operation.
That’s just the tally from this year, they are also responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths across Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ukraine.
All I asked was for people to be more critical and thoughtful. The whole situation is terrible, and as far as I can see, our confusion has led all of these bad actors to benefit including IRGC and Israel.
AMZN could have for example bought a "Gepard" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard) - easily shoots down cruise missiles and drones. Just a couple millions would have saved billions.
One> An executive has to care about a cost center, then proceeds to invest in prevention instead of looking like a hero after, instead of putting off a fire an getting a promotion or bonus. Which is nigh impossible.
Two> Our tech overlords try to push for our cyberpunk present to at least look kinda cool. Which they also refuse todo.
Radars and bases along the path of travel from Iran to Israel have been progressively degraded. Various interceptor types also have low stockpiles at present. I'm absolutely not an expert keeping well-informed, but my understanding is that Jordan's recent losses mean much of the path is now relatively clear of air defenses, and Israel would have to mount most/all defenses from their own territory for the first time. But Israel is at-present not engaging in the war, preferring to let US do the work, as a minister recently stated. Regardless, it may be attacked, depending on IDF actions in Lebanon.
The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.
Israel is not an ethno state. About 21% of citizens are Arab. They vote, sit in the Knesset, have served on the Supreme Court, and hold full formal civil rights.
There are also other factually wrong things in your comment, but let's leave it at that.
Cash payments, rental subsidies, mortgage discounts, free healthcare, free tuition, tax credits, tax exemptions, job placement, immediate citizenship, etc. All if you're of a certain ethnicity.
Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to
their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]
It's amazing how these people don't seem to get that the very fact it's an occupation makes basically everything Israel does there illegitimate.
If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Also, Israel designates tents dual use.
Designating an AWS location very likely used for targeting assistance during this war on Iran is a very different thing.
You mean that massive "Hamas headquarters" that the IDF promised us was under Al Shifa hospital? The one they made renders of with dozens of rooms, but after attacking the hospital all we got was footage of single small hospital-tiled room, that Israelis themselves admitted they built?
> Who, if anyone, is Iran allowed to retaliate against?
The answer here is surrender and disarmament. It's the only outcome that seems compatible with the reintegration of Iran into the world economy, normalization of diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, and path to development/prosperity for its people.
And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?
Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.
AWS's 3 data centres in me-south-1 are:
BAH53 (Manama): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492345589
BAH54 (Zallaq): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1359931661
BAH55 (Hamala): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/956069872
If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.
Update: IRGC published satellite imagery a few hours ago showing an impact to BAH54, apparently impacted on 2026-07-24, alongside another undated image before the impact. From a quick comparison of both images with reliable satellite imagery sources (e.g. WV02 image dated 2025-02-21 on ESRI World Imagery Wayback) there are no obvious signs of image manipulation, with roof features and surrounding buildings/other features lining up as expected. Additionally the claimed post-strike image adds a significant number of vehicles to the site (when there are usually close to none present), which may correspond to fire fighting vehicles expected to be monitoring the site afterwards. Further, Sentinel-2 imagery from 2026-07-24 shows a dark patch (blast damage) on the roof of BAH54 per https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=18&lat=26.0509...
> If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain
I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
Can you give an example? I find this hard to believe. Why not pick a location not within a "major airport flight path"? It seems much cheaper.
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> It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
I think the two kinds of attacks are so different that they require different defenses.
Drones need not fly in straight lines. Data centers need ventilation, providing a path for drones. Putting grids in a ventilation shaft will stop the first drone, but a coordinated attack will use one drone to blow up defenses and a second/third/etc one to reach the target
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It is probably far cheaper to simply have global redundancy for the data and compute than to put the datacenter in a bunker.
Tell everyone that you have global redundancy and they won't even bother to damage it because it won't help their cause.
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Update 2:
Upon checking Sentinel-2 imagery for BAH55 from 2026-03-29 to 2026-04-13 (and all later imagery) there is also visible blast damage to the roof of BAH55, which would correspond in timing to media reports about damage caused about 2026-04-01. Sentinel-2 imagery appears to clarify AWS' claim of "while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities" to mean a direct impact to the building. However it seems likely from high resolution satellite imagery of BAH55 that the machinery rooms of the building perhaps took most of the damage, perhaps leaving data halls in a better shape elsewhere in the building (but possibly still unusable due to water/smoke damage).
[1] https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=17&lat=26.156&...
[2] https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/?zoom=17&lat=26.156&...
It's sad but also interesting that in someone's disaster recovery plan now they need to add a line item about analyzing which datacenters are behind air defenses.
What's hosted at BAH54?
The 8200 used Microsoft datacenters in Netherlands and Ireland and got cut off.... maybe they switched providers
Isn't an AWS region comprised of at least three data centers "many kilometers apart"[1]?
So, if the whole of me-south-1 (Bahrain) went down it means at least three buildings many kilometers apart must have been attacked.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regio...
See also - Bahrain Held the Data — Riyadh Held the Vision - https://houseofsaud.com/aws-bahrain-vision-2030-irgc/
Shows unavailable, last status update 30th April https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587
There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.
This is just one of the popular ones, but there were also tens of posts about it with only 1-10 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503
The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.
> Why would it be flagged?
Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.
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It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.
As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.
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> Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.
Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".
Oftentimes discussions get killed not because the source article is bad but because the discussions themselves devolve into flame bait/war?
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There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.
I'm sure there are businesses in the UAE, but wondering, why would one keep instances/data on a zone at risk since well over a year now.
Genuinely curious. Aside for high frequency trading where latency is so vital.
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Sat Photo https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-service...
me-south-1 is in fact, quite possibly permanently, "offline".
I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.
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Related: Ukraine have been targeting [1] warehouses owned by Wildberries, the Russian domestic equivalent of Amazon, causing $2.2bn of damage to-date.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/24/ukraine-wareho...
These feel quite different. IRGC attacked Amazon compute. Ukraine attacked several warehouses. Comparing Wildberries to Amazon is also only half the truth. Wildberries is directly part of russian war machine as soldiers need to buy essential dual-use equipment there and they even sell weapons.
AWS hosts all DoD cloud infrastructure. Isn't that analogous?
I suspect in both cases the primary motivation is "there's a huge box full of expensive stuff and if we get a drone inside the whole box burns to the ground".
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I wonder why they don’t target Russian data centers? Much harder to repair or replace.
Datacenters are full of metal. Warehouses are full of cardboard boxes and styrofoam.
A rack of 14 $5k servers is worth $70k. A half-pallet stacked two meters high with $50 rubber dicks, each in a 30x10x10 cm box, is worth around $24k, and has the same form factor. There are more expensive servers but there are also more expensive products.
But large data centers would be maybe 10k square meters in one building, while the largest building of the Elektrostal Wildberries warehouse was over 150k sqm.
A datacenter, if successfully and completely burned down, would of course cause disruption (although in a well designed redundant system it shouldn't), but doing so is harder and burning down a major logistics hub causes disruption too.
The warehouse also leaves a hard to deny, widely visible reminder to the population that the war has consequences, in the form of a Moscow-sized smoke cloud: https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=33.290517136221574,5... (plus endless videos of small sellers lamenting their fate).
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Hitting the enemy where it hurts. It's much more effective to hurt Russian morale by making big explosions and petrol rain from striking a refinery or stopping/delaying shipments to the front line than by shutting down a center where a handful of people work and that won't directly impact the war. Ukraine must making fighting painful enough that the Russians withdraw, because the math of attrition favors the much more populous and richer Russians long term.
the point of hitting them is to cause commercial damage to american companies. In reality, this changes little in terms of US capacity. Doing the equivalent of this to Russia would be attacking their oil ports and infrastructure.
wildberries has been taken over by an oligarch and the only powers in Russia that Putin may hear are the oligarchs. There will be no 'overthrow of Putin' in Russia because there is no institutional support and it is well understood by literate people - a revolution is not just a disorganized uprising on the streets (what happens the next day? - return to normal) it requires years of planning and support.
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Do they even still exist? It's not easy to find even a small russian VPS to be a reverse proxy for your encrypted messenger project any more.
1. Wow this is a headline.
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
The civilization in which you are a part of, this very mass that is greater than you and I, is evolving and changing. How can there not be new unique headlines?
After a period of the same regurgtation, you get stale. It makes 100% perfect sense why a data center is a strategic place to attack.
Just talk to me, 10, 20 years ago, there was no true conversation around attacking datacnters.
Just think how much RAM and SSD's were lost. :(
I feel for both, people who where hosting there not expecting this war and this attack and the attackers, because they didn't attack just because they wanted but attacked as a response as stated earlier.
Winner: US military industrial complex + Israel
Losers: Everyone else
Please explain how attacking a civilian data center in an uninvolved country is a "response".
Bahrain hosts bases that the US uses to attack Iran, and Amazon is part of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program that provides the DoD with cloud services.
Bahrain is host to the headquarters of the US fifth fleet, a notable US airbase, and thousands of US military personnel. These assets are being used to attack Iran.
They’re involved.
The article has actual quotations on Iran's justification: this is in response to a recent US attack on civilian infrastructure (an under-construction Iranian nuclear powerplant with no nuclear material present)
Let’s say you live in the northern US and Canada signs a deal with China to put air bases with Chinese missiles just north of the US border.
Would that be fine? Or would that cause a lot of tension with Canada and make them involved in a US-China conflict?
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I'm not defending it, but these countries host US bases.
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What do you mean? It is very clear that Trump declared war on Iran. That's factual.
Civilian damage occurs all the time - often on purpose (infrastructure), sometimes not directly on purpose (drones getting off-target for various reasons, that also happens and not all of this is on purpose). What Iran does here is increase the cost of waging warfare against it, to make continuation of war as unappealing as possible. To claim the nearby countries are "uninvolved" while hosting military bases or providing targeting data to the USA is just propaganda. Why would you insinuate this? It is clearly an incorrect statement. One can debate whether targeting amazon is useful or not, but definitely you don't have an uninvolved country here, so much is clear. Besides, all companies of a given country at war, need to provide data and money anyway.
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American agression winning silly prizes.
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Wrongly flagged dead (like a lot of comments get on these Iran threads):
know-how 1 hour ago [dead] | parent | next [–]
Iran has been killing Americans and Israeli since the 1970s. Read a history book.
Not “wrongly flagged dead”, insta-dead because commenter is a consistent shit-poster. Put down the history book and read the comment history. If you feel strongly about it, vouch for the comment instead of reposting.
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Swipes and personal attacks (in the flagged comment) violate HN guidelines.
It would have been ... better ... without the 2nd sentence.
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My colleague in Dubai says that ATM's are all working so the claim that bank infrastructure is down may not be correct.
Was there really no other source than "houseofsaud.com" here? Seems like a strange source to be promoting on HackerNews. Their About, Contact, and Press pages don't even work. I can not find who owns this publication.
I don't see them listed on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com either, which is usually a red flag for me. For example you can find other suspicious sources - like Iran International - on there https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/iran-international-bias-and-c...
> Their About, Contact, and Press pages don't even work.
The whole website seems to have issues, probably because of AWS issues in the middle-east. But archived pages are available:
- About: https://web.archive.org/web/20260719174647/https://houseofsa...
- Contact: https://web.archive.org/web/20260328195438/https://houseofsa...
The article is about Iranian state media announcing the strikes, so here's the article from Iranian state media: https://www.tasnimnews.ir/en/news/2026/07/24/3655089/irgc-an... . Not sure if it's been independently confirmed via satellite imagery though, I looked on Twitter but just saw satellite photos from Iranian media (i.e. https://x.com/SoarAtlas/status/2080490121284272431 )
It does seem like we'd be better off with a more neutral source, but the only other article I could find from today (as opposed to 3 days ago) was https://iranwire.com/en/news/155401-irgc-claims-second-strik..., which doesn't look (or sound) like a neutral source either.
Euronews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004096
This one got more upvoted for some reason though.
Don't forget the instant dickover. I lasted two seconds post load before I hit back.
As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.
They are certainly LLM-generated. I'm sure it's been done, but I would love to see a comprehensive look into what it is exactly that makes a UI seem LLM-generated.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Lack of visual hierarchy. Lots of use of bold text to make numbers stand out, without bolding the corresponding labels. Reliance on heavily-saturated primary colors. Limited attention paid to alignment.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
> I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.
The entire houseofsaud.com site appears to be LLM-generated, I wouldn't trust a single thing it says.
I wouldn't trust a single thing it says even if it was human-generated.
Used for translation maybe? I tried to scan to see which plugins, but it had two responses for me, and the second one was 'off'
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They're definitely Claude generated. People at my last company loved to generate pages & stat cards with Claude and they all had this exact same style.
Part of it is the clash with the pages UI. Dark black cards in the middle of a light theme.
This is the claude code frontend-skill.
The "Conflict Pulse" status dot is really the shit cherry on top.
My annoyance is that it's hard to figure out if it's actually up-to-date or not. If you click "Live conflict timeline →" it brings you to a collection of pages not updated since April (and at different points in April, oddly). The date count seems right, the oil price might have been correct when it was published but isn't "live" despite being labeled that way.
I wonder how the real House of Saud would feel about having their name used by some random news website? Not amused, probably...
Who knows, someone might end up in a suitcase!?
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in the Ukraine war, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
Centralised and long-distance commerce (and passenger travel) are all but wholly predicated on minuscule risks.
I draw parallels between the development of whales and large-scale shipping:
- Both are comparatively recent developments. Giant whales are less than 5 million years old, large cargo ships (tankers, dry bulk, containers) at what are now considered ordinary scales are less than three decades old. (See: <https://logisticselearning.com/largest-container-ships/> especially graphic here: <https://logisticselearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/im...>.)
- Both require highly-efficient propulsion: mammalian metabolism, petroleum-fueled diesel engines, respectively.
- Both require widely-separated resource opportunities. For whales, seasonally-abundant food such as krill or fish; for cargo, large-scale production and consumption of goods separated by water.
- Both require comparative safety from predators. Large adult whales have virtually no natural predators (orcas being a notable exception), until human whaling grew in scale largely since the 1500s and accelerating greatly through the 19th and 20th centuries, during which whole populations where annihilated. Maritime shipping depends on a lack of piracy or hostile naval warfare, with tremendous losses to traffic being seen during the 1st and 2nd World Wars in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
(There's a similar pattern with air travel, in which flights virtually instantly divert far from active combat zones. The list of airliner shoot-down incidents is surprisingly large: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...>.)
Highly-centralised or choreographed logistics chains are also fragile and subject to disruption. During WWII, the Soviet Union was initially inclined to One Big Dump supply depots, possibly a hallmark of centralised planning. These proved attractive targets and quite harmful to ongoing operations, and over the course of the war much more decentralised patterns emerged, or so I dimly recall from long-ago reading. Decentralised operations are integral to much guerilla / asymmetric warfare by the inferior party.
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The Gulf States aren't at war with Iran.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who naively thought he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
They aren't neutral either. They're hosting military bases and miilitary assets that are being used to attack them. They are allowing their airspace to be used. Same with their waters and ports.
Which is to say that all the military assets in Gulf countries, including this Amazon DC, are valid military targets.
The Gulf States are in fact military rivals and cold adversaries of Iran; Iran vs. the Gulf States is a more salient geopolitical conflict than Iran vs. Israel. Iran has, through the IRGC, been in hot wars with the Gulf States in the last 10 years.
Officially, neither is the US, since Trump doesn't have that power.
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Struck Wildberries depots are in Russia, not Ukraine.
They hit one in Crimea yesterday.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ukraine-hits-russias-larg...
At least some of them, it depends on who you ask (Simferopol). But I had been using Ukraine as a shorthand for the conflict, so editing it to be clearer
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Which reminds me: a friend made a wild mulberry pie yesterday with some dried mulberries shipped in from Chernobyl a year ago. He set it to cool overnight but when he checked in early morning and cut a slice, he found some of the berries glowed in the dark.
His quandary: should he eat it anyway? Seems like the radiation should be minimal, after all. Or maybe wait until this next Wednesday when he has a stomach x-ray and eat a small slice just beforehand to confound his primary care physician (they are both great practical jokers!)?
I didn't know they had significant fruit production in Russia and Ukraine. What sort of berries do they produce?
"Wildberries" is a Russian online retailer, comparable to Amazon.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildberries>
How long will it take to rebuild those datacenters given the supply shortage? Are we talking like 3+ years?
> How long will it take to rebuild those datacenters given the supply shortage?
Amazon will already have quite a lot of hardware queued up for new datacenter builds and expansions, some of that will presumably be redirected to this project once folks stop chucking missiles around. They also pride themselves on the speed of new datacenter rollout - even if they have to bulldoze the site and start from scratch, I doubt it takes as long as a year.
The bigger story is how there's a complete media blackout on this and why it's not a bigger news story in places without one
3 years after all parties put weapons down?
amazon says the UAE one will take 'several months', I think that's probably a hard thing to guess though.
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DIMMs and SSD prices are about to go “plaid”.
The disconnection of the world into isolated anclaves proceeds as planned.
As someone who has lived most of his life in Iran, I ask those who find any alignment with the IRGC to please understand that it is a religiously fanatic military and terrorist group.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
Iranian here, I have no love for the IRGC but I am glad they are keeping Americans from destroying our country right now.
We don't need Americans to "save us", we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues. It would be great if the West started respecting the sovereignty of other nations.
I have a hard time sympathizing with the Pahlavi supporters cheering the bombing of our home.
My comment wasn’t about the West saving us, nor was it about supporting Pahlavi (which I personally did, but of course I’m against the continued bombing of my country).
What I’m saying is that supporting one of the biggest terrorist group in the world by the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a grave mistake. It legitimizes one of the biggest, if not the biggest, reasons behind the current situation in Iran and some other bad situations in the region.
If you are an Iranian, you know what IRGC has done and keep doing, how good they are at propaganda and how nothing is beyond them including killing (and worse) anyone anywhere in the name of their god.
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I don't know if you realize - but the Americans have offered IRGC a pretty generous deal that essentially removes almost all sanctions in return to stop developing nukes, and the IRGC itself is escalating the situation, which could force America to bomb Iran again.
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How is attacking a random datacenter keeping the Trump administration from attacking Iran?
> we have 90M intelligent people and can resolve our own issues
This seems counterfactual, unless you called the regime for which you state you «have no love for» "satisfactory" or its length "insignificant".
> we have 90M intelligent people
This is also a pretty unbelievable claim - were it so, I and many others would move to Iran immediately. Can we say you are not being literally factual?
I don't care about Iran's leadership and think this shouldn't be the US's war to fight. Also, we aren't even trying to replace their government, we're just attacking per Israel's wishes. There must be a lot of Americans who agree.
Israel's leader is wanted by the international court for genocide. And lets not forget how Iran's current government took power? US installed a dictator in Iran because UK was angry that Iran nationalized the UK owned oil fields. This led to a coup, which resulted in the current Iranian government.
There's no good guys. Why is the US even there?
Edit: downvoted to -3. Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
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What are alternatives. You can't change from inside and you can't change from the outside.
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"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
-Thucydides' Melian Dialogue
Given how clownish the US is handling this war, I'm afraid you just have to get used to it.
No-one in their right mind wants to support IRGC. But, to see an egotistic, deranged, clown and the entire circus getting slapped in the face, is very satisfying to watch.
Yes true, but also anyone in Iran no matter what part your from wants the US gone in the region. The US is seen as responsible for allowing slavery in many golf states. It's also responsible for unfair businesses. And seen as a mafia state that steals resources.
unfortunately- you've terrorists & warmongers governing all 3 parties in this war.
Yes. American attack on Iran did not help anything though, and threw a lot of countries and people into pretty bad situation.
Hard to like anyone in this situation.
And what happened before then? Iran had a secular prime minister, Mossadegh, but the UK and US supported, among others, conservative clerics to overthrow that elected government to put in a dictatorship.
Then in the 1970s the CIA provided SAVAK with the names of secular left opposition to arrest and execute.
So spare me talk about foreigners supporting religious fanatics, the western establishment did so for decades.
I for one don't want my tax dollars used to bomb schools in Iran.
This is absolutely 100% true, which is why deliberately destroying all the pre-existing structural deterrents to their bad behavior was such a disaster.
Iran did bad things, but not as much as they could. Now they're doing more bad things and we can't stop them.
Almost no one finds "alignment" with the IRGC.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
I totally agree with most of what you’ve said. The only part I disagree with is the whitewashing of what the IRGC has done across the region for years. Dismissing or minimizing its actions/impact simply because we also oppose other bad actors is, imo, a critical mistake.
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It's interesting that Cuba, Iran, and even Venezuela all took as part of their identity some sort of adversarial position with the United States (although Venezuela was post-Chavez). The US is currently treating them, to some degree at their word at this point.
Whereas you could look at a place like Vietnam that fought its war and moved on, Trump's focus is largely dealing with actors that never did. I suspect the Saudi's won't be the only Nuclear deal signed. So much of this is just the cold war extended, but with North Korea and Iran trying to work their way past non-proliferation. The natural response would also be to arm South Korea and possibly Japan. All of which would have been the West's natural response to non-proliferation being violated.
I get the perception, but much of this is decades in the making and almost everyone involved including the US should have sued for peace years ago. Actual peace. Not, "we're not firing rockets but Israel can't exist."
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I doubt you'll find many people here who are in alignment with a bigoted and criminal regime such as Iran's and its military.
What may be misinterpreted as sympathy for them is sympathy for the suffering Iranians, and antipathy for the criminal and bigoted US foreign policy especially in the Middle East. This did not start with Trump's recent idiotic game; Iran's only democratically elected president so far was toppled in 1953 by the CIA at the request of Churchill, because they felt Iran's oil does not belong to the Iranian people but to British Petroleum.
Good thing tjat Trump and Netanyahu ensured the IRGC will stay in power for many years to come, then
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"Lived in Iran" is more likely Jewish Iranian than Israeli. A lot were forced out. Idk, I don't want to play this game.
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A more nuanced take might be that, in certain situations, there can be more than one bad actor. Have you considered that?
I think what they mean is that IRGC funded Hamas operations.
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WTF? We've banned this account.
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> The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. Sahih Muslim 2922
When they're surrounded on every side by people who devote their lives to Hadith such as these, I can't blame them. Their enemies set up bases under hospitals, schools. Their wives and children are human shields. I think they're doing pretty well with the situation they've been handed. The situation is more complex than "They're firing on civilian populations", because their enemy fights in civilian clothing, and hides in civilian crowds. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place and are doing what they can to survive.
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Sorry, no country has a right to anything. We should do what's best for ourselves. This isn't it.
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Israel hasn't committed genocide by any definition of the word, but I really enjoy that your solution is the slaughtering of millions of Jews.
> then it is for the best if their country is destroyed entirely
Deep, deep thoughts, man.
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They even seem to be creating a backup plan in South America given how much attention they’re putting into the domestic politics of Argentina etc.
Funny how history rhymes sometimes
The Iranian regime killed in a matter of days approximately the same amount of civilians as the IDF killed in Gaza over the course of their entire operation.
That’s just the tally from this year, they are also responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths across Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ukraine.
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Were they? The Bolsheviks murdered (conservatively) 20 million innocent civilians. Not really sure the Nazis hold a candle to them.
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All I asked was for people to be more critical and thoughtful. The whole situation is terrible, and as far as I can see, our confusion has led all of these bad actors to benefit including IRGC and Israel.
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Is there a news article on this event that isn’t AI slop?
Despite the destruction, me-south-1 still has more nines than us-east-1
this datacenter appears to be 99.99 percent destroyed
There's usually more than one datacenter in an AZ.
I don't know if this is serious or if it's a joke.
They wouldn't fake uptime for their shareholders, now would they?
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Won’t get a red dot until they pour molten lava over it.
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0.99999
Lmao
After this strike, the only AWS region in the ME that remains operational is the one in Tel Aviv (a bit ironic if you ask me).
UAE has been down for months, Bahrain is now offline, Saudi Arabia is still under construction.
AMZN could have for example bought a "Gepard" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard) - easily shoots down cruise missiles and drones. Just a couple millions would have saved billions.
So you’re saying American corporations should start having their own military divisions.
(I realize it’s a stretch from what you’re suggesting but if you think about it, not really)
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There are plenty of comparable systems in US bases that nevertheless were frequently hit.
Dog-pod grids:
<https://diamond-age.bib.bz/security-measures-adopted-by-atla...>
That would imply two things:
One> An executive has to care about a cost center, then proceeds to invest in prevention instead of looking like a hero after, instead of putting off a fire an getting a promotion or bonus. Which is nigh impossible.
Two> Our tech overlords try to push for our cyberpunk present to at least look kinda cool. Which they also refuse todo.
not really ironic given the billions of dollars israel gets to defend themselves. Iran, and most of the modern world, are not idiots.
Radars and bases along the path of travel from Iran to Israel have been progressively degraded. Various interceptor types also have low stockpiles at present. I'm absolutely not an expert keeping well-informed, but my understanding is that Jordan's recent losses mean much of the path is now relatively clear of air defenses, and Israel would have to mount most/all defenses from their own territory for the first time. But Israel is at-present not engaging in the war, preferring to let US do the work, as a minister recently stated. Regardless, it may be attacked, depending on IDF actions in Lebanon.
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The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.
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Iran has launched thousands of missiles at Israel over the last few months. The idea they're worried about Israeli nuclear weapons is fanciful.
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Israel is much farther away and has an advanced missile defense system.
Israel also has a lot more options for retaliations against Iran then nukes.
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> and their government has no qualms with committing war crimes.
Safe reminder both Israel and Iran, and arguably Iran more so, commit “war crimes”.
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MAD has been effective since its inception, but in these times it feels like rules are for losers.
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Israel is not an ethno state. About 21% of citizens are Arab. They vote, sit in the Knesset, have served on the Supreme Court, and hold full formal civil rights.
There are also other factually wrong things in your comment, but let's leave it at that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliyah
Cash payments, rental subsidies, mortgage discounts, free healthcare, free tuition, tax credits, tax exemptions, job placement, immediate citizenship, etc. All if you're of a certain ethnicity.
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They also have right to steal houses and land in the west bank?
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Luddite-ism with ballistic missiles sums up 2026 perfectly
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Relevant section:
Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]
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It's amazing how these people don't seem to get that the very fact it's an occupation makes basically everything Israel does there illegitimate.
If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Also, Israel designates tents dual use.
Designating an AWS location very likely used for targeting assistance during this war on Iran is a very different thing.
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You mean that massive "Hamas headquarters" that the IDF promised us was under Al Shifa hospital? The one they made renders of with dozens of rooms, but after attacking the hospital all we got was footage of single small hospital-tiled room, that Israelis themselves admitted they built?
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Which speaks to Paul's credit.
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Must we attach identity to everyone? I don't care about personalities, only about ideas.
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Who, if anyone, is Iran allowed to retaliate against?
The US started this. Amazon is an American company with many governmental and military contracts. Why would it not be a valid target?
How many Iranian hospitals, schools, bridges, data centers, etc have been destroyed?
> Who, if anyone, is Iran allowed to retaliate against?
The answer here is surrender and disarmament. It's the only outcome that seems compatible with the reintegration of Iran into the world economy, normalization of diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, and path to development/prosperity for its people.
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And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?
You think war should be “fair?”
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What do the Americans get for their relatives murdered by IRGC throughout the years?
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Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.
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oh no haha don't target the data centers that are destroying our climate that would make me soooo mad ;)
What?
Yawn. The less Amazon the better. Wake me up when they start paying taxes.
Good!
Soo.. Is this bullish for the stock price or nah?