It is worth being a bit nuanced here, the Iranians are clearly going to be quite worried about getting nuked. They were already quite worried about getting into a war full stop, despite their aggressive actions like intentionally putting their country between all those US military bases or purposefully throwing their leadership in front of those missiles that were peacefully transiting Iranian airspace.
The idea that they're holding back from hitting the AWS data centre in Tel Aviv because of nukes could well be fanciful, but it is hard to know what their calculations are. As an armchair general it seems like it'd be good for Iran to blow it up nukes or no but war is always a bit uncertain.
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.
Iran also isn't hitting Israel because they know Israel will go after Tehran and the regime more directly. They were the ones to target the Basij police, industrial and steel plants, government buildings etc. America is mostly constraining itself to bombing the coast and military assets, with a focus on the strait.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
> Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
Also, Israel will not abandon (or be abandoned) by the US, but the others might want to cut their losses if supporting the US becomes costlier than being neutral.
The game being played is extremely interesting, with high stakes and no margin for error. Too bad people die.
Iran has recently demonstrated the ability to execute accurate strikes in Jordan. If it can do so in Jordan, it can do so in Israel once Israeli air defences are similarly degraded. Doubly so because many missiles meant for Israel were intercepted by Jordan.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
This assumes Iran is maintaining consistent stockpiles and still has the capability of large attacks, including their fancier missiles which can avoid SAM systems. It's been well reported the number of drones/missiles Iran fired has consistently decreased. Israel and the US destroyed most of their missile factories so Iran is going to be conservative with how they use them.
At the peak Iran fired 650 missiles at Israel and only killed 28 people, mostly from hitting a single residential building. These days Iran is only firing small salvos into gulf states and only 20-30 drones at a time. I'd be surprised if they could pull off 2025 numbers when they fired a hundred at Israel.
> It's been well reported the number of drones/missiles Iran fired has consistently decreased.
One way of interpreting that statistic is that they are running out of munitions. Another way is to consider that stockpiles are not running low, but the initial response was a collection of high-burn, uncoordinated, decentralized tactical actions after an attempted decapitation-strike disrupted top-down C&C. Now that the fog of war has cleared, and communication has been restored, a more strategic regime is now in effect.
Iran has been getting consistent impacts on US bases in Jordan essentially every day for the past few weeks, and they are well defended.
At the end of the day Iran has more missiles than the US has interceptors. So when you get to the point when you're talking about running out, they just don't need to launch big salvos anymore.
Yes this is essentially what I was thinking. And there have been repeated estimates about Iranian stockpiles that have proven completely wrong. I think they have been able to manufacture throughout the war.
The political party I am a member off wanted a total arms embargo on Israël including anti air defense. (It didn't go anywhere ofcourse. But that a mainstream party is fed up with Israël is quite revolutionary).
Although what has changed is that Israël is no longer getting guns for free they need to pay for it same as everyone else. Progress!
The north of israel also wasn't evacuated for the recent Iran campaign. That was in 2024 and they didn't evacuate for the recent ground invasion they did in Southern Lebanon.
You seem to be woefully uninformed on this subject. Far northern Israel was evacuated in 2023 and has long since moved on to reconstruction. No significant damage in the area was directly from Iran, it was all from Hezbollah (their proxy militia 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.
Forgive the uninformed question, but doesn't Saudi Arabia also have significant armed forces? Given that Iran has closed the Straights of Hormuz and attacked several other Arab states, and has conducted strikes in Saudia Arabia itself, wouldn't that give Saudia Arabia a solid reason to strike back?
Iran has threatened to attack Saudi oil infrastructure if the Saudis join the Israel-American war on Iran. The Iran War Is Destroying Something More Valuable Than Oil - https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-refinery-crisis-saudi-aramc... As it has become clear that the US missile defence shield over Saudi Arabia is inadequate (as the US can't provide enough interceptors), the Saudis have decided to be cautious.
From what I have read, their armed forces aren’t very motivated. There are stories about pilot trainings where the pilots were a bunch of rich guys that got into their jet, took off with full afterburner, did some fun loops and landed after using up their fuel.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
Saudi Arabia has carried out airstrikes in Iran - but geography is a good reason not to want to escalate hostilities, despite the generational animus between the countries.
Many former army personnel have told me that the militaries of Oman (British-trained and equipped) and UAE (Australian and British-trained, US-equipped) are better in terms of capability and valor than most European countries, including even Germany's. Where they do face issues is in equipment stockpiles and sustaining conflict, which is what we've seen.
The Saudi main army is pretty incompetent, but the Royal Guard is extremely effective. They are separately trained by the West and maintain comms separate from the main army. And now they've teamed up with Pakistan, which has one of the best air forces in the region.
Qatar recently opened up a route for citizenship to foreign veterans who serve in their armed forces. That guarantees them a steady supply of soldiers from the region should the need arise.
The most vulnerable are Bahrain and Kuwait, but both of them have had help with security actions from their more competent neighbors.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?
It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.
There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.
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.
It's not like Amazon doesn't have tactical teams on call - if that was a priority, I'm sure it would have been done. But like any good datacenter provider, they have offsite backups, and I'd expect the damaged hardware will just be written off.
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?
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.
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?
> US installed a dictator in Iran because UK was angry that Iran nationalized the UK owned oil fields.
> Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
It is widely assumed, but not factually correct, that the US was responsible.
On August 15th 1953 the CIA staged a coup to overthrow the government, but it failed. By the next day the State Department was actively trying to enter into diplomatic talks.
Three days later a group of clerics headed by Ayatollah Borujerdi took advantage of the situation and stirred up unrest that was ultimately responsible for the Shah taking power. They had been concerned about Mossadeq embracing secular liberalism and a referendum that dissolved the Majlis (parliament/congress). MI-6 had offered them support, but they rejected it.
The funny thing is that the prosecutor for the ICC (Khan) who issued charges against Netanyahu was just removed today over sexual assault allegations, which had previously not been reported because the Muslim victim was worried that the charges against Netanyahu would be dropped. Khan literally messaged her “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants”. Palestine has been such an effective political tool for the Muslim oligarchs and patriarchy. So anyway… more bad guys.
Why do we think it's our job to intervene in other countries like this?
And if we wanted to help another country, working with the international community should be the only approach we take.
We've spent many decades overthrowing countries to what end? Even our vassals like Israel have universal healthcare while we're all in debt because of healthcare. It's not working and needs to stop.
In this case, the US was pretty involved in destabilizing the country. If the us and the uk hadn't intervened in 50s, Iran would have made a successful transition from monarchy to democracy. I guess we can discuss if the US owes anything to anyone, but a case for the us correcting earlier mistakes can definitely be made.
I can't assume that Iran would've successfully transitioned to democracy, or that it's even what should happen there. All those Arabian Gulf countries are monarchies.
It comes down to the simple reality that "I am because we are" and as such any time a human being is oppressed we are all oppressed.
One could make the argument the people who live in liberal democracies have an obligation to help those who unfortunately do not and who are still forced to live under autocratic oppression.
There were periods in history where most people lived under the thumb of some sort of autocrat of one form or another be they monarchs or religious leaders. Most people had very few human rights and had little opportunity for self-determination. Through the hard work of revolutionaries around the world many of those autocrats were deposed and others seeing the writing on the wall offered power to the people more willingly.
Think of it like a jailbreak where the jailer is oppressive and everyone in the jail is innocent. On your wait out should help open the cells of as many people as you can if only out of your own self interest because a larger mob escaping gives each individual a better chance to escape due to strength in numbers but also because it's just the right thing to do.
It's sort of the same thing here, Our ancestors (or even some of us) got out from under the thumb of an autocrat jailer but there are still others in that jail. If we don't help them who will? What would you want someone else to do if you were in their situation? To walk by an unjustly imprisoned person's jail cell and not free them when it is trivial to do so makes you the jailer.
Now that's the theory. In practice, I agree with much of what you're saying -- reality is a far trickier place than we'd like and the details make doing the right thing difficult if not impossible. And that doesn't cover the reality that western democracies are imperfect themselves and that many of their citizens are still subject to repression by their own autocratic leaning leaders, and so that we can't always do the right thing, but we should at least aspire to.
If you overthrow one autocrat and the society is not ready to self-govern, you'll just have another one taking his place. The best you can do is to fund some kind of democratic opposition on the ground and in exile, hoping to grow a political class mature enough that they will take over after autocrat loses power one way or another.
Well, maybe start fixing problems at home before spending tens of billions not fixing things anywhere else? we can't even change ourselves for the better, an adjudicated rapist, alleged pedophile rules us, and we're going to reform other countries? what grounds do we have to be casting stones ? "they're killing protestors!" I hear many westerns say, while ignoring the americans we're jailing for 30 years, calling terrorists for protesting the extrajudicial killings ICE are doing.
we have millions without healthcare, above subsistence employment, food security. Why are americans worried about "changing" iran?? Let's look in the mirror, folks.
Either treat it as not our problem, or if we're going to get involved, have a strategy to change the government. Yes it has been done in Iran at least once from the outside, maybe twice.
The alternative is what the last five American presidents have done: containment. There's a reason Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Bush didn't start the war that Trump did. This is why.
Ground troops have to invade Iran. Trump can't do that now because of upcoming midterm elections. After the elections, if there is no other way then Trump has to send ground troops in.
Forget Iraq, forget Afghanistan... because This Time It's Different
and of course ground troops _have_ to invade Iraq, Saddam has WMD's. And it will finally bring stability to the region. And they _have_ to invade Afghanistan, there is no way to take out bin Laden otherwise. And it will finally bring stability to the region. Casualties will be minimal because the oppressed natives will welcome us as liberators and our overwhelming military superiority will ensure our troops suffer no casualties.
There are no good choices here. It is either ground invasion and restore Ahmadinejad to power, or accept defeat and accept whatever "protection fee" Iran wants to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
The alternative is it just destroy all their oil infrastructure and wait for the regime to collapse from lack of funds. But Trump doesn't want to do that (or let Israel do it) because he dreams of taking all that oil for himself and his buddies like in Venezuela.
If you do that, the oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure of the Gulf states will go down together with Iran. And besides that, why do you want to fight Iran to begin with?
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 know what IRGC has done, my cousin was spent 6 months in the Evin prison after the Mahsa uprising and her entire life was stolen from her. So I don't need a moral lecture.
But the IRGC is the only one defending my home right now. I also find it curious why you are not calling the US or Israel against this illegal aggression against our country?
Then we have both suffered from IRGC. as I have loved ones who were killed by them, and we both have a stake in the country’s security, since my family and most of my friends still live there.
What I’m saying is that we should not legitimize the IRGC. Trump is bad, the current Israeli government is very bad, and the IRGC is very bad.
On another note, the IRGC is defending itself, not us. They’ve killed exponentially more people in days than US or Israel has over in total. Again, all of these are bad.
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.
You forgot to mention a small detail, the US did that only after they started a war. The US is known for its perfidy at this point, so any deals they propose aren't exactly trustworthy, and the US couldn't even contain israel after the latest MoU which made it void.
If only the prior P5+1 / Iran JCPOA deal of 2015 that constrained HEU and was backed up multi country inspectors and tamper resistant / revealing on site instrumentation hadn't been thrown out the window by some fool.
Why on earth would anyone trust a country that reneged on a hard fought deal and followed that up by bombing during negotiations to restore what was lost.
I’m sure they’re no angels, but the people on the other side (not the gulf states, that other country) are so nakedly evil that it’s hard not to root for them a little bit
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Only then will you have the moral altitude to "go after theirs".
Not until WE have prosecuted OUR war criminals, will we have the precedent to prosecute any other nations' war criminals [1].
So, get on with it, citizen. Hold your government accountable. The people always get the governments they deserve.
[1] - No, "the West" is not morally capable of going after Putin, Netanyahu, etc. Not until we start prosecuting our own war criminals with real, effective results.
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."
Trump's domestic policies are an abject, colossal failure (hey remember the 10% credit cards and eliminating the deficit and the debt and fixing the goods trade deficit -- now at historic highs, btw -- and all those big DOGE and tariff rebates, and...), and just invading random nations has always been a go to when that happens. Traditionally it was easy public support, and after a whole campaign about being insular and not being the world's cop, suddenly it's guns blazing and let's boost military spending to $1.5T (while simultaneously stepping back from NATO). So Trump picked some targets that would minimize kickback. And are you saying that not being friends with the US is a green light to invade? I mean, you understand that by every principal of international law, the US is a criminal pirate empire, terroristically murdering in large numbers at will.
I guarantee that Trump has asked the US military for concrete plans on invading Canada, Greenland, and beyond. There is zero question about it, and it will all come out in the ashes that remain after this disastrous administration.
And sure, proliferation is going to go wild, not because the US bequeathed them (I mean...do people think the US holds the key to nuclear weapons? That it gives the green light?). The US has taught a lesson that everyone needs to get nukes, and most of them should be pointed at the US.
We are headed to an incredibly dangerous timeline. And eventually it is going to end up with some glassed American cities. But hey, at least the Trump crime syndicate got rich in the process!
It all comes down to the chicken and the egg. The fact is Iran has a justified hatred towards Israel and armed aggressors against Israel (Hamas). Israel allowed this and even favored it because Hamas de-legitimized the possibility of a free and independent Palestinian state. Israel also funded Hamas.
Israel is a settler-colonial state engaging in decades long genocide and apartheid. The real question one should ask oneself is: Why is America involved? It is purely to protect Israel because our politicians are bought by Israeli & defense money.
It doesn't matter to America if Iran is fanatical. It doesn't matter to America if Iran has nukes. It all comes down to Israeli lobbying and war games.
You need to wake up and understand that there is no morality in geopolitics, Iran has sided with China and Russia because it acts in it's self interest. Israel acted in it's self-interest (though I would argue it over-played it's hand). America should act in it's self-interest and retreat from Iran, even if that means the eventual collapse of the status-quo equilibrium in the mid-east and abandoning Israel.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Play with fire... if you sell services to store intelligence on occupied population to the occupant, and have no qualms about it, should anyone care you get your shit bombed from time to time? Just comes with the territory. Aside from hating how much real resources are wasted on pointless wars and assholery between people, at least this is fair.
> The AWS strikes did not emerge from an improvised targeting decision. On March 31, 2026, the IRGC formally declared eighteen US technology companies “legitimate military targets” — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla, Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm.
Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.
Fwiw, there is tons of evidence of these company's complicity with Israel's occupation (it's probably a much longer list if we want to look at those that enable the US' wars).
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]
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.
It seems only fair that Iran's frozen funds be permanently seized and used to pay for damages caused to Amazon, ships, and other facilities it targeted during the war.
> 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.
Iran will never surrender because US/Israel proved themselves unequivocally to be brutal savages that will torture, rape and kill you if you surrender. There is literally no point in surrendering to a barbarian horde.
There's so many people here who have clearly lost their ability to think clearly any time Israel is involved. I'm sure it's just coincidence though and nothing else is going on.
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?
installing a brutal puppet dictator to torture and murder civilians counts as what exactly?
and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?
the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.
The US didn’t install the shah to torture and murder civilians. It was shahs choice to do so.
To blow up civilian target is a choice.
I know nuance is unpopular nowadays but I do see a difference between bad decisions with unintended consequences and bad decisions with intended terrible results.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
~250 alone on one day in 1983. 300-400 total from their terrorist networks. Thousands of casualties (wounded and killed) in Iraq that are directly attributed to Iran.
I do so wish everyone espousing 1:1 casualty ratios as necessary & fair, and that anything else is immoral, would take stock of where they live and specifically how those countries avoided falling to the axis powers in WW2…
And, courage of their convictions, if their own people are so inherently evil for making “the other bastard die for his” they should be renouncing citizenship, yielding their ill-gotten wealth, and self-immolating for their nations eternal shame.
Categorical reasoning as applied to war does not yield a tit for tat, its category versus category. All of column B to preserve any column A. “Not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”.
At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
> They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.
Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:
The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.
Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.
The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.
> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe
The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.
I don't understand what it means to say that the US is hostile to Iran because of "religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons". Are you saying that the US backs one of the two major Islamic branches?
You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.
My children will avoid any form of participation in US military operations, and I legally avoid paying as much US federal tax as possible ("how many of my tax dollars have contributed to killing innocent people?"), so I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic beyond as a scholar of history and predicting the future. Old men sending young innocent people to die is a tale as old as time, and I expect it to continue long after I’m gone (regardless of nations, boundaries, etc, which are also fluid over time), so the best one can do is manage your personal risk accordingly. We must assume it to be a constant of some sort until change occurs where that assumption would change. If tail risk catches you (“wrong place at the wrong time” through no fault of your own), c'est la vie.
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.
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.
Won’t get a red dot until they pour molten lava over it.
Solid lava just won't do.
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.
Retaliatory strikes against Israel are much more scripted as they have nuclear weapons and their government has no qualms with committing war crimes.
The whole affair has been so bizarre.
Iran has launched thousands of missiles at Israel over the last few months. The idea they're worried about Israeli nuclear weapons is fanciful.
It is worth being a bit nuanced here, the Iranians are clearly going to be quite worried about getting nuked. They were already quite worried about getting into a war full stop, despite their aggressive actions like intentionally putting their country between all those US military bases or purposefully throwing their leadership in front of those missiles that were peacefully transiting Iranian airspace.
The idea that they're holding back from hitting the AWS data centre in Tel Aviv because of nukes could well be fanciful, but it is hard to know what their calculations are. As an armchair general it seems like it'd be good for Iran to blow it up nukes or no but war is always a bit uncertain.
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.
MAD has been effective since its inception, but in these times it feels like rules are for losers.
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.
Iran also isn't hitting Israel because they know Israel will go after Tehran and the regime more directly. They were the ones to target the Basij police, industrial and steel plants, government buildings etc. America is mostly constraining itself to bombing the coast and military assets, with a focus on the strait.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
> Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
Also, Israel will not abandon (or be abandoned) by the US, but the others might want to cut their losses if supporting the US becomes costlier than being neutral.
The game being played is extremely interesting, with high stakes and no margin for error. Too bad people die.
Iran has recently demonstrated the ability to execute accurate strikes in Jordan. If it can do so in Jordan, it can do so in Israel once Israeli air defences are similarly degraded. Doubly so because many missiles meant for Israel were intercepted by Jordan.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
This assumes Iran is maintaining consistent stockpiles and still has the capability of large attacks, including their fancier missiles which can avoid SAM systems. It's been well reported the number of drones/missiles Iran fired has consistently decreased. Israel and the US destroyed most of their missile factories so Iran is going to be conservative with how they use them.
At the peak Iran fired 650 missiles at Israel and only killed 28 people, mostly from hitting a single residential building. These days Iran is only firing small salvos into gulf states and only 20-30 drones at a time. I'd be surprised if they could pull off 2025 numbers when they fired a hundred at Israel.
> It's been well reported the number of drones/missiles Iran fired has consistently decreased.
One way of interpreting that statistic is that they are running out of munitions. Another way is to consider that stockpiles are not running low, but the initial response was a collection of high-burn, uncoordinated, decentralized tactical actions after an attempted decapitation-strike disrupted top-down C&C. Now that the fog of war has cleared, and communication has been restored, a more strategic regime is now in effect.
Iran has been getting consistent impacts on US bases in Jordan essentially every day for the past few weeks, and they are well defended.
At the end of the day Iran has more missiles than the US has interceptors. So when you get to the point when you're talking about running out, they just don't need to launch big salvos anymore.
Yes this is essentially what I was thinking. And there have been repeated estimates about Iranian stockpiles that have proven completely wrong. I think they have been able to manufacture throughout the war.
The political party I am a member off wanted a total arms embargo on Israël including anti air defense. (It didn't go anywhere ofcourse. But that a mainstream party is fed up with Israël is quite revolutionary).
Although what has changed is that Israël is no longer getting guns for free they need to pay for it same as everyone else. Progress!
I would be worried about staying in the Jumeirah Burj Al Arab, these days.
I suspect that Iran knows that going after Dubai would upset a lot of American (and Sunni) billionaires.
UAE paid Iran billions of dollars to halt strikes: Report - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uae-paid-iran-billions-do... .
Danegeld!
The service might be a bit poor, given that Burj Al Arab has already been closed for months since Iran struck it in the beginning of March.
Ah. Makes sense. I have been deliberately avoiding keeping up with that mess.
...which I now return to...
The north of Israel has been completely evacuated. But yeah Iran didn't do any damage. lol
The north of israel also wasn't evacuated for the recent Iran campaign. That was in 2024 and they didn't evacuate for the recent ground invasion they did in Southern Lebanon.
... was at one point partially evacuated. It isn't currently, and hasn't been for years at this point.
You may be confused with southern Lebanon, which is.
You seem to be woefully uninformed on this subject. Far northern Israel was evacuated in 2023 and has long since moved on to reconstruction. No significant damage in the area was directly from Iran, it was all from Hezbollah (their proxy militia 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.
Forgive the uninformed question, but doesn't Saudi Arabia also have significant armed forces? Given that Iran has closed the Straights of Hormuz and attacked several other Arab states, and has conducted strikes in Saudia Arabia itself, wouldn't that give Saudia Arabia a solid reason to strike back?
Iran has threatened to attack Saudi oil infrastructure if the Saudis join the Israel-American war on Iran. The Iran War Is Destroying Something More Valuable Than Oil - https://houseofsaud.com/iran-war-refinery-crisis-saudi-aramc... As it has become clear that the US missile defence shield over Saudi Arabia is inadequate (as the US can't provide enough interceptors), the Saudis have decided to be cautious.
From what I have read, their armed forces aren’t very motivated. There are stories about pilot trainings where the pilots were a bunch of rich guys that got into their jet, took off with full afterburner, did some fun loops and landed after using up their fuel.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
Saudi Arabia has carried out airstrikes in Iran - but geography is a good reason not to want to escalate hostilities, despite the generational animus between the countries.
Arab militaries, whilst sometimes well equipped, are thoroughly incompetent, possibly by design. They are not a major factor here.
Many former army personnel have told me that the militaries of Oman (British-trained and equipped) and UAE (Australian and British-trained, US-equipped) are better in terms of capability and valor than most European countries, including even Germany's. Where they do face issues is in equipment stockpiles and sustaining conflict, which is what we've seen.
The Saudi main army is pretty incompetent, but the Royal Guard is extremely effective. They are separately trained by the West and maintain comms separate from the main army. And now they've teamed up with Pakistan, which has one of the best air forces in the region.
Qatar recently opened up a route for citizenship to foreign veterans who serve in their armed forces. That guarantees them a steady supply of soldiers from the region should the need arise.
The most vulnerable are Bahrain and Kuwait, but both of them have had help with security actions from their more competent neighbors.
last time ksa went to war it was against yemen, and didnt go very well.
A show army - the monarchy don't trust an army of rural peasants - they might get ideas and stage a coup.
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.
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
St. Petersburg is certainly in Russia. Thanks for clarifying.
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.
Officially, neither is the US, since Trump doesn't have that power.
If you take that approach, Ukraine is still a special operation.
Of course, which is why I called the whole lot wars until someone started HN nitpicking one of them
I didn't know they had significant fruit production in Russia and Ukraine. What sort of berries do they produce?
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.> 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
What's hosted at BAH54?
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=47641788
Here’s another popular one: 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.
> and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war
Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?
I love how you immediately proved their point while trying to prove them wrong.
> Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?
It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.
There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.
Israel has a right to exist. Please don't spam HN with terroristic comments saying it doesn't.
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.
The only reason we knew about it is that it was one of our network output 'node', but I don't think I've read anything about it in generalist medias
Are you implying that something that gets reported on, shouldn't be on HN? Also, clearly it wasn't that extensive if GP hadn't heard about it
I learned about it from HN, a while ago.
Oftentimes discussions get killed not because the source article is bad but because the discussions themselves devolve into flame bait/war?
Having reviewed the comments I don’t see any indication of why it would be flagged for the discussion.
Probably somebody flagged it for being too well moderated and therefore not agreeing enough with their side.
> 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.
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.
I'm surprised you'd think sending civilians into a war zone is a good thing.
War zones tend to have lots of people in already, and many of them really want a job.
It's not like Amazon doesn't have tactical teams on call - if that was a priority, I'm sure it would have been done. But like any good datacenter provider, they have offsite backups, and I'd expect the damaged hardware will just be written off.
1.5M civilians already live in Bahrain. This usage makes the term "war zone" meaningless.
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/
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?
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.
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?
> US installed a dictator in Iran because UK was angry that Iran nationalized the UK owned oil fields.
> Did i say anything that was untrue? Or do people not like the truth?
It is widely assumed, but not factually correct, that the US was responsible.
On August 15th 1953 the CIA staged a coup to overthrow the government, but it failed. By the next day the State Department was actively trying to enter into diplomatic talks.
Three days later a group of clerics headed by Ayatollah Borujerdi took advantage of the situation and stirred up unrest that was ultimately responsible for the Shah taking power. They had been concerned about Mossadeq embracing secular liberalism and a referendum that dissolved the Majlis (parliament/congress). MI-6 had offered them support, but they rejected it.
I would highly recommend this book if you can get a copy: https://www.amazon.com/Iran-CIA-Fall-Mosaddeq-Revisited/dp/0...
The funny thing is that the prosecutor for the ICC (Khan) who issued charges against Netanyahu was just removed today over sexual assault allegations, which had previously not been reported because the Muslim victim was worried that the charges against Netanyahu would be dropped. Khan literally messaged her “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants”. Palestine has been such an effective political tool for the Muslim oligarchs and patriarchy. So anyway… more bad guys.
> This led to a coup, which resulted in the current Iranian government.
I mean, you're passing over the violent revolution from socialists and Islamists.
What are alternatives. You can't change from inside and you can't change from the outside.
Why do we think it's our job to intervene in other countries like this?
And if we wanted to help another country, working with the international community should be the only approach we take.
We've spent many decades overthrowing countries to what end? Even our vassals like Israel have universal healthcare while we're all in debt because of healthcare. It's not working and needs to stop.
In this case, the US was pretty involved in destabilizing the country. If the us and the uk hadn't intervened in 50s, Iran would have made a successful transition from monarchy to democracy. I guess we can discuss if the US owes anything to anyone, but a case for the us correcting earlier mistakes can definitely be made.
I can't assume that Iran would've successfully transitioned to democracy, or that it's even what should happen there. All those Arabian Gulf countries are monarchies.
there's much more to the story of Iran than the simple "oh of course the UK and US are bad"
It comes down to the simple reality that "I am because we are" and as such any time a human being is oppressed we are all oppressed.
One could make the argument the people who live in liberal democracies have an obligation to help those who unfortunately do not and who are still forced to live under autocratic oppression.
There were periods in history where most people lived under the thumb of some sort of autocrat of one form or another be they monarchs or religious leaders. Most people had very few human rights and had little opportunity for self-determination. Through the hard work of revolutionaries around the world many of those autocrats were deposed and others seeing the writing on the wall offered power to the people more willingly.
Think of it like a jailbreak where the jailer is oppressive and everyone in the jail is innocent. On your wait out should help open the cells of as many people as you can if only out of your own self interest because a larger mob escaping gives each individual a better chance to escape due to strength in numbers but also because it's just the right thing to do.
It's sort of the same thing here, Our ancestors (or even some of us) got out from under the thumb of an autocrat jailer but there are still others in that jail. If we don't help them who will? What would you want someone else to do if you were in their situation? To walk by an unjustly imprisoned person's jail cell and not free them when it is trivial to do so makes you the jailer.
Now that's the theory. In practice, I agree with much of what you're saying -- reality is a far trickier place than we'd like and the details make doing the right thing difficult if not impossible. And that doesn't cover the reality that western democracies are imperfect themselves and that many of their citizens are still subject to repression by their own autocratic leaning leaders, and so that we can't always do the right thing, but we should at least aspire to.
If you overthrow one autocrat and the society is not ready to self-govern, you'll just have another one taking his place. The best you can do is to fund some kind of democratic opposition on the ground and in exile, hoping to grow a political class mature enough that they will take over after autocrat loses power one way or another.
> alternatives...
Well, maybe start fixing problems at home before spending tens of billions not fixing things anywhere else? we can't even change ourselves for the better, an adjudicated rapist, alleged pedophile rules us, and we're going to reform other countries? what grounds do we have to be casting stones ? "they're killing protestors!" I hear many westerns say, while ignoring the americans we're jailing for 30 years, calling terrorists for protesting the extrajudicial killings ICE are doing. we have millions without healthcare, above subsistence employment, food security. Why are americans worried about "changing" iran?? Let's look in the mirror, folks.
Either treat it as not our problem, or if we're going to get involved, have a strategy to change the government. Yes it has been done in Iran at least once from the outside, maybe twice.
The alternative is what the last five American presidents have done: containment. There's a reason Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Bush didn't start the war that Trump did. This is why.
Even Biden and Bush got too involved in the region. There's really not much for us to gain there, because it's not for us. Biden is still #1 on this list https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind...
Do nothing and let them live in peace.
Ground troops have to invade Iran. Trump can't do that now because of upcoming midterm elections. After the elections, if there is no other way then Trump has to send ground troops in.
Forget Iraq, forget Afghanistan... because This Time It's Different
and of course ground troops _have_ to invade Iraq, Saddam has WMD's. And it will finally bring stability to the region. And they _have_ to invade Afghanistan, there is no way to take out bin Laden otherwise. And it will finally bring stability to the region. Casualties will be minimal because the oppressed natives will welcome us as liberators and our overwhelming military superiority will ensure our troops suffer no casualties.
They didn't even change the excuse, it's supposedly WMDs again
If you thought Afghanistan was a disaster, Iran would be at least 10 times worse.
There are no good choices here. It is either ground invasion and restore Ahmadinejad to power, or accept defeat and accept whatever "protection fee" Iran wants to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
People have been saying we're going to invade Iran for almost 25 years now. It's always just about to happen, yet never does.
Ground troops. Not going to happen or will become a disaster. And even if, what exactly would be their mission?
> Not going to happen or will become a disaster.
The one coherent rule of this administration is that "will become a disaster" is not a part of the decision making process.
to die for israel
The alternative is it just destroy all their oil infrastructure and wait for the regime to collapse from lack of funds. But Trump doesn't want to do that (or let Israel do it) because he dreams of taking all that oil for himself and his buddies like in Venezuela.
If you do that, the oil, gas, and desalination infrastructure of the Gulf states will go down together with Iran. And besides that, why do you want to fight Iran to begin with?
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 know what IRGC has done, my cousin was spent 6 months in the Evin prison after the Mahsa uprising and her entire life was stolen from her. So I don't need a moral lecture.
But the IRGC is the only one defending my home right now. I also find it curious why you are not calling the US or Israel against this illegal aggression against our country?
Then we have both suffered from IRGC. as I have loved ones who were killed by them, and we both have a stake in the country’s security, since my family and most of my friends still live there.
What I’m saying is that we should not legitimize the IRGC. Trump is bad, the current Israeli government is very bad, and the IRGC is very bad.
On another note, the IRGC is defending itself, not us. They’ve killed exponentially more people in days than US or Israel has over in total. Again, all of these are bad.
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.
You forgot to mention a small detail, the US did that only after they started a war. The US is known for its perfidy at this point, so any deals they propose aren't exactly trustworthy, and the US couldn't even contain israel after the latest MoU which made it void.
Not true. The US has been negotiating with Iran for over a year about a nuclear deal before the war started. This has all been public.
If only the prior P5+1 / Iran JCPOA deal of 2015 that constrained HEU and was backed up multi country inspectors and tamper resistant / revealing on site instrumentation hadn't been thrown out the window by some fool.
Why on earth would anyone trust a country that reneged on a hard fought deal and followed that up by bombing during negotiations to restore what was lost.
"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.
unfortunately- you've terrorists & warmongers governing all 3 parties in this war.
I’m sure they’re no angels, but the people on the other side (not the gulf states, that other country) are so nakedly evil that it’s hard not to root for them a little bit
> 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.
There's is information where even their troops on the ground attack civilians.
They have been targeting journalists.
Also what about the children? Why they do keep targeting them.
Israel is a terrorist state openly committing atrocities, and proud of it. There is no need to simp for them.
I'm not simping. I'm just demonstrating that the Islamic religion is psychotic.
What's your point? Do you also use talmudic quotes to justify violence against jews? Or the Torah?
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. 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.
Good thing tjat Trump and Netanyahu ensured the IRGC will stay in power for many years to come, then
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.
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.
PROSECUTE ALL WAR CRIMINALS.
But, start with YOUR OWN FIRST.
Only then will you have the moral altitude to "go after theirs".
Not until WE have prosecuted OUR war criminals, will we have the precedent to prosecute any other nations' war criminals [1].
So, get on with it, citizen. Hold your government accountable. The people always get the governments they deserve.
[1] - No, "the West" is not morally capable of going after Putin, Netanyahu, etc. Not until we start prosecuting our own war criminals with real, effective results.
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."
You mean the countries the US has physically and economically attacked for decades having resentment for that?
As for Vietnam, they're suffering from tariffs, why are you assuming they're also no negatively affected by the Trump admin?
> Trump's focus
Trump's domestic policies are an abject, colossal failure (hey remember the 10% credit cards and eliminating the deficit and the debt and fixing the goods trade deficit -- now at historic highs, btw -- and all those big DOGE and tariff rebates, and...), and just invading random nations has always been a go to when that happens. Traditionally it was easy public support, and after a whole campaign about being insular and not being the world's cop, suddenly it's guns blazing and let's boost military spending to $1.5T (while simultaneously stepping back from NATO). So Trump picked some targets that would minimize kickback. And are you saying that not being friends with the US is a green light to invade? I mean, you understand that by every principal of international law, the US is a criminal pirate empire, terroristically murdering in large numbers at will.
I guarantee that Trump has asked the US military for concrete plans on invading Canada, Greenland, and beyond. There is zero question about it, and it will all come out in the ashes that remain after this disastrous administration.
And sure, proliferation is going to go wild, not because the US bequeathed them (I mean...do people think the US holds the key to nuclear weapons? That it gives the green light?). The US has taught a lesson that everyone needs to get nukes, and most of them should be pointed at the US.
We are headed to an incredibly dangerous timeline. And eventually it is going to end up with some glassed American cities. But hey, at least the Trump crime syndicate got rich in the process!
It all comes down to the chicken and the egg. The fact is Iran has a justified hatred towards Israel and armed aggressors against Israel (Hamas). Israel allowed this and even favored it because Hamas de-legitimized the possibility of a free and independent Palestinian state. Israel also funded Hamas.
Israel is a settler-colonial state engaging in decades long genocide and apartheid. The real question one should ask oneself is: Why is America involved? It is purely to protect Israel because our politicians are bought by Israeli & defense money.
It doesn't matter to America if Iran is fanatical. It doesn't matter to America if Iran has nukes. It all comes down to Israeli lobbying and war games.
You need to wake up and understand that there is no morality in geopolitics, Iran has sided with China and Russia because it acts in it's self interest. Israel acted in it's self-interest (though I would argue it over-played it's hand). America should act in it's self-interest and retreat from Iran, even if that means the eventual collapse of the status-quo equilibrium in the mid-east and abandoning Israel.
My colleague in Dubai says that ATM's are all working so the claim that bank infrastructure is down may not be correct.
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.
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)
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.
I'm not defending it, but these countries host US bases.
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.
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'
Definitely more than translation. This page has every AI UI trope under the sun. The titles on the main page also all seem very AI-speak
I wouldn't trust a single thing it says even if it was human-generated.
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.
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.
Don't forget the instant dickover. I lasted two seconds post load before I hit back.
Euronews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995033
CNBC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004096
This one got more upvoted for some reason though.
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!?
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.
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.
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
Is there a news article on this event that isn’t AI slop?
Play with fire... if you sell services to store intelligence on occupied population to the occupant, and have no qualms about it, should anyone care you get your shit bombed from time to time? Just comes with the territory. Aside from hating how much real resources are wasted on pointless wars and assholery between people, at least this is fair.
This ends only in the total destruction of the Middle East, which is relevant to slow down climate change anyway.
we're just mask off eco-fascist now, huh?
> The AWS strikes did not emerge from an improvised targeting decision. On March 31, 2026, the IRGC formally declared eighteen US technology companies “legitimate military targets” — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla, Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm.
Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.
Fwiw, there is tons of evidence of these company's complicity with Israel's occupation (it's probably a much longer list if we want to look at those that enable the US' wars).
Most recently the UN report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-...
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]
Completely self inflicted btw.
The most unpopular war the US has ever known which has made every person in the world worse off financially, all for Israel's demands.
I really don't hate to say it but maybe that ethno state should be left to deal with their matters themselves.
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.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
I guess Anthropic is safe, since they aren't military infrastructure
Soo.. Is this bullish for the stock price or nah?
It seems only fair that Iran's frozen funds be permanently seized and used to pay for damages caused to Amazon, ships, and other facilities it targeted during the war.
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.
Iran will never surrender because US/Israel proved themselves unequivocally to be brutal savages that will torture, rape and kill you if you surrender. There is literally no point in surrendering to a barbarian horde.
Yes, Israel and the US are the "barbarian" horde.
Definitely not the country that slaughters protestors by the thousands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Iran_massacr...
There's so many people here who have clearly lost their ability to think clearly any time Israel is involved. I'm sure it's just coincidence though and nothing else is going on.
Germany and Japan surrendered and have done pretty well since.
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?”
There is no fighting in the War Room!
I did not first bring up fairness in this thread.
What do the Americans get for their relatives murdered by IRGC throughout the years?
What do the Iranians get for us overthrowing their government in the 50s? (we are not the good guys here)
There is a difference between overthrowing the government and blowing up civilian targets.
installing a brutal puppet dictator to torture and murder civilians counts as what exactly?
and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?
the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.
The US didn’t install the shah to torture and murder civilians. It was shahs choice to do so.
To blow up civilian target is a choice.
I know nuance is unpopular nowadays but I do see a difference between bad decisions with unintended consequences and bad decisions with intended terrible results.
You are saying this in a thread about an impact of a war we just made up and did not do in any sane way.
Let's do it fairly.
Like 100s (?) of Americans killed by Iran ever.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
~250 alone on one day in 1983. 300-400 total from their terrorist networks. Thousands of casualties (wounded and killed) in Iraq that are directly attributed to Iran.
> Let's do it fairly.
How would it work? Do you expect a 1:1 casualty list? 1:1 list of events? Should the US citizens allow for a coup on US soil carried out by the IRGC?
I do so wish everyone espousing 1:1 casualty ratios as necessary & fair, and that anything else is immoral, would take stock of where they live and specifically how those countries avoided falling to the axis powers in WW2…
And, courage of their convictions, if their own people are so inherently evil for making “the other bastard die for his” they should be renouncing citizenship, yielding their ill-gotten wealth, and self-immolating for their nations eternal shame.
Categorical reasoning as applied to war does not yield a tit for tat, its category versus category. All of column B to preserve any column A. “Not worth the bones of a single British Grenadier”.
At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
You can say the same thing about Iran. They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.
Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe, so what’s happening now is expected.
> They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.
Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:
The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.
Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.
The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.
> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe
The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.
I don't understand what it means to say that the US is hostile to Iran because of "religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons". Are you saying that the US backs one of the two major Islamic branches?
You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/g-s1-134037/why-is-it-so-hard... (“… the U.S. has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire.”)
I would say that as the form of government and the legal landscape of a country as a whole US fares much better than the Islamic Republic.
My children will avoid any form of participation in US military operations, and I legally avoid paying as much US federal tax as possible ("how many of my tax dollars have contributed to killing innocent people?"), so I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic beyond as a scholar of history and predicting the future. Old men sending young innocent people to die is a tale as old as time, and I expect it to continue long after I’m gone (regardless of nations, boundaries, etc, which are also fluid over time), so the best one can do is manage your personal risk accordingly. We must assume it to be a constant of some sort until change occurs where that assumption would change. If tail risk catches you (“wrong place at the wrong time” through no fault of your own), c'est la vie.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30908249
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-have-military-deaths-chang...
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.
The US started the war though and have very recently been targeting civilian infrastructure as well. So by your logic should be replacing it.
If Iran had the capability to drop a bomb on Mar a Lago, I imagine they'd have done it by now. And the world might be a better place for it.