Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed yesterday that its cruise missiles destroyed an Amazon data centre in Bahrain, it was reported yesterday.

Speaking via an online statement, the IRGC claimed that the “central data infrastructure of the US company Amazon in Bahrain” was targeted and “destroyed” with the missiles.

It added that “US air defence systems and radar installations in the Bahraini areas of Muharraq and Riffa” were also targeted in the attack. The Public Relations Department for the IRGC said the attack was in response to the “invasion and assault by the US infanticide army on the facilities under construction and civilian Darkhoyin”.

The news comes as the conflict between the US and Iran has intensified again in recent days, with direct military confrontations taking place for more than ten consecutive days. This is as a result of the ceasefire agreed in June collapsing, leading to a series of retaliations between both the US and Iran.

With the US intensifying its attacks on Iranian infrastructure, Iran had warned that it would target facilities and infrastructure operated by or made available to US forces.

Amazon has still not commented on the incident. According to the AWS Health Dashboard, service in Bahrain is listed as currently unavailable, and the Middle East is still listed as “disrupted”, although an update hasn’t been made since April of this year.

The dashboard reads: “The Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications … we strongly recommend customers migrate all accessible resources to other Regions and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups as soon as possible.”

This isn’t the first time data centres in the Middle East have been impacted by the conflict. An Oracle data centre in Dubai has previously been hit and the IRGC has threatened to attack G42’s planned data centre in the UAE, which is part of the Stargate project.

In April, the IRGC said it planned to target major US technology companies across the Middle East, including Apple, Microsoft and Google. In a statement released at the time by Sepah News, the official outlet of the IRGC, the force identified 18 companies it claims were involved in planning and monitoring targets for US strikes.

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