Amazon Web Services confirmed it cannot restore service to data centers in Bahrain and the UAE six months after Iranian drone strikes. March was when this happened. The drones hit two facilities in the UAE. Another site caught damage from a nearby strike.
Six months is 180 days. That's enough time to build a new data center from scratch if you're not completely f*cked. AWS chose option B.
The cloud was supposed to eliminate single points of failure. Redundancy across regions. Failover protocols. Geographic distribution. Then a $20,000 drone showed up and turned AWS into a brick-and-mortar store that got fire-bombed.
Every CTO who moved infrastructure to AWS because on-premises was too risky is now explaining to their board why their disaster recovery plan didn't account for actual disasters. The presentation slide that said "99.99% uptime guaranteed" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in legal right now.
Retail traders saw this headline and bought the dip on AMZN because they think AWS is just a website. They don't know what a data center is. They think the cloud is weather.
Meanwhile Jeff Bezos is on a yacht somewhere not giving a sh*t because he sold at the top and AWS could get hit by a meteor tomorrow and he'd still be richer than your entire family tree combined.
The real story is that Amazon spent six months looking at rubble in the desert and decided rebuilding was too expensive or too dangerous or both. They just wrote off entire countries. Clicked delete on Bahrain.
Somewhere a startup founder is refreshing his AWS dashboard wondering why his app hasn't worked since March, but he keeps getting billed anyway.
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