Data centres that support online banking, transport applications, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are increasingly being targeted in military operations, with attacks by Ukraine, Russia and Iran demonstrating how damage to physical infrastructure can disrupt digital services across borders. Ukrainian drones have reportedly destroyed three major data centres belonging to Russian technology group Yandex near Moscow, temporarily disabling its Yandex Taxi transport application and Yandex Pay payment service. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also claimed that the strikes had deactivated Russian bots.
The attacks illustrate a growing vulnerability in the global digital economy: services that appear to operate virtually depend on physical facilities that can be damaged or destroyed by missiles and drones. In a report published by Spanish newspaper El País, the recent strikes are examined as evidence that data centres are becoming increasingly prominent targets in modern warfare, with consequences extending well beyond the countries directly involved in a conflict.
Russia has also been attacking Ukrainian data centre infrastructure since March, according to repeated allegations by Kyiv. Iran, meanwhile, targeted commercial data centres belonging to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on 28 February, following US and Israeli bombardments that marked the beginning of the war. Iranian drones destroyed three facilities, disrupting regional cloud services and affecting payment systems across the Persian Gulf. The consequences spread to other AWS availability zones, with difficulties reported in services operating in parts of the Americas and on the east coast of the United States.
The Iranian strikes also affected services outside the immediate conflict zone. Snowflake, Anthropic’s Claude and some financial applications experienced operational difficulties in the United States and elsewhere. More seriously, some of the information stored at the destroyed AWS facilities was permanently lost. In a statement to El País, Tomáš Foltýn, an analyst at cybersecurity company ESET, said the attacks demonstrated that “the physical distance of a conflict zone is no longer a guarantee of not suffering the impacts of war”.
Matt McCrann, a former executive at drone-defence company DroneShield with experience in the United States and the Middle East, told Forbes that data centres were “secondary targets, just after the obvious military sites”. The attacks suggest that infrastructure once regarded primarily as commercial property is now being considered in military planning because of its economic value and potential role in supporting military operations.
Data centres are specialised industrial facilities filled with racks of servers that run remote applications and store digital information. They support services ranging from email and online document editing to streaming platforms and banking applications. They have also acquired another important function: training and operating artificial intelligence models, which require powerful processors and substantial electricity supplies. Their importance to both commercial activity and emerging technologies makes them valuable infrastructure whose destruction can have extensive consequences.
The high cost of building and operating these facilities adds to their attraction as targets. Data centres require advanced equipment, reliable power supplies and extensive technical infrastructure. Colonel Ángel Gómez de Ágreda, author of Un mundo falaz. El nuevo orden global en la era de los algoritmos y la manipulación, told El País that attacking the facilities made military sense from Iran’s perspective. He argued that they represented investments worth billions of dollars associated with projects that followed a visit by US President Donald Trump early in his term, as well as other business interests involving Trump and his family in the region.
Gómez de Ágreda also argued that data centres could be considered legitimate military targets where they provide support for military operations. That assessment highlights a difficult distinction in contemporary warfare: facilities serving commercial customers may also support activities relevant to national security, while their destruction can affect businesses and civilians who have no direct connection to military operations.
The global dependence on cloud computing has expanded rapidly. According to Synergy Research Group figures cited by El País, AWS holds 28 per cent of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market, followed by Microsoft’s Azure with 21 per cent and Google Cloud with 14 per cent. Businesses generally use data centres close to the markets they serve to reduce latency, the time required for information to travel between a device and a server. Netflix’s international expansion, for example, benefited from long-term agreements with AWS, allowing it to use the company’s global infrastructure to deliver streaming services across numerous countries.
Cloud providers normally build groups of three similar facilities within a geographical area known as an availability zone. The arrangement is designed to allow services to continue operating if one facility fails, with data replicated across the group to reduce the risk of loss. However, that protection can be defeated if all three facilities are destroyed simultaneously by missiles or other weapons. Iran has carried out several waves of attacks against data centre infrastructure over the past six months, according to the El País report, while Ukraine’s latest strikes against Russia illustrate the same vulnerability.
Companies can reduce the risk by replicating critical data across multiple facilities, either within the same country or in different countries. AWS recommends that businesses whose operations depend on uninterrupted access to information, including airlines and banks, maintain such copies. The additional protection comes at a higher cost, however, and the final decision rests with each customer, according to AWS sources cited by El País.
Following the Iranian attacks, AWS urged customers to migrate their data to other regions. The company said most had done so and had been able to resume operations using backups. Businesses that stored information exclusively in the destroyed facilities were not as fortunate. After working through the summer to recover the affected information, AWS announced on 15 September that some data could not be restored.
The company has not disclosed which customers suffered losses. The affected businesses are known to have been based in the Middle East, and the interruption of payment services has led to speculation that banks and payment providers were among those affected. Iran also claimed to have struck Israeli companies, although that claim was not confirmed. AWS has kept the identities of the affected customers confidential.
The attacks demonstrate that redundancy and geographically distributed storage can reduce the risk of disruption but cannot guarantee recovery when multiple facilities are destroyed together. As governments and companies depend increasingly on cloud infrastructure for financial transactions, digital services and artificial intelligence, the physical security of those facilities has become a direct concern for the continuity of operations across national borders.
