Similar attacks have since taken place in Russia and Ukraine, where both sides have been trading tit-for-tat strikes on data centers.
Read more: How the Iran War Could Threaten Global Internet Access
“Data centers are now on the critical path for modern digital infrastructure,” Kirk Cameron, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech, tells TIME. “The loss of key data centers could collapse economies, disrupt public and private transportation with loss of GPS, and affect government essential services for health, emergency dispatch, and power grids.”
“Data centers are competitive advantages in warfare,” Cameron says. “Knocking out capabilities means potentially crippling combat operations for an adversary. It’s also a form of economic warfare and could lead to longer-term competitive challenges for the target.”
Those facilities have been mostly offline ever since; Amazon said on Sept. 15 that it had been “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in those two regions.
Ukraine’s response began on Oct. 8, and it has since carried out drone strikes on three data centers belonging to tech giant Yandex, often called Russia’s version of Google. The first site hit, in Sasovo, houses two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to develop its AI models, Meduza reported, and the outage disrupted several companies relying on Yandex’s cloud services, including Russian Railways, MegaFon, T-Bank, and several media outlets.
How have tech companies responded?
The spate of attacks over the last year has already caused tech companies to rethink how and where they build data centers.
Emily Harding, director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes that data centers have become a new frontline in warfare—and that may require new strategies.
The U.S. has largely followed a policy that attacks on American companies do not constitute an attack on the United States, but Harding says the government may need to decide on a new approach “that creates deterrence not just to protect life and health, but also data.”
“The knock-on effect is that the companies that own the data centers are realizing they can't protect them, and that kind of calls into question the cloud model in general,” Harding says. “They're having to make big adjustments. You could see a time in the future where Amazon starts losing business to Microsoft because Microsoft does a better job of hiding where their data centers are.”
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