As the United States and Israel continue to bombard Iranian targets in and outside of the country, crippling its leadership, destroying military facilities, and killing scores of civilians in the process, Iran has responded with hundreds of unpredictable and scattered missile and drone attacks. Many have been directed at neighboring Arab countries, hitting hotels, oil refineries, apartment blocks, airports, and government and diplomatic facilities, potentially pulling reluctant states into an escalating conflict.

Attacks on energy infrastructure or shipping lanes with the potential to ripple outside the region are a familiar part of modern war. But a series of Iranian drone strikes in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain tells a new story about how wars will be fought in the future: with tiny, cheap drones in the sky disabling massive, critical data centers on the ground.

Early evidence of this strategy arrived in the form of a short, vague message notifying Amazon Web Services customers of possible outages:

We are investigating issues with AWS services in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region.

We are investigating issues with AWS services in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region.

This was followed by an update describing “a localized power issue” and another........

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