Before dawn on March 1, 2026, while most of the Gulf was asleep, a swarm of Iranian Shahed drones crossed into the United Arab Emirates. They weren't headed for a military base. They weren't aimed at a port or an airstrip. They were looking for something far more valuable — and far more vulnerable. They found it. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE took direct hits. A third in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike. Structural damage. Fires. Power knocked out. Fire suppression systems flooded the hardware with water. Two of the three availability zones in AWS's entire Middle East region went dark simultaneously — something the system was never designed to survive. Banks went offline. Payments failed. Careem, the Gulf's dominant ride-hailing and delivery platform, went down. Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank — all reported disruptions. The UAE stock market halted. AWS quietly told its customers to migrate their workloads to othe...
Descriptions by other ambassadors of other leaders' political and personal attitudes have not been much less graphic.
On the plus side, protesters also seemed to understand that despite the deaths of scores of rioters, there were limits to how far modern leaders could go in maintaining their rule by force. Maybe that was also a lesson of the crushing of Saddam Hussein, who knew no such limits, by George Bush and Tony Blair."
Protesters have now taken to Social Media to share the latest happenings in Tunisia. Facebook pages have been created, Tweets on Twitter have started flying and YouTube has videos on the riots and protests in Tunsia. t's really nice to see how far dictators can go in a modern world. Well, not too much, as we can see from the way events are headed.
Tweets from Twitter.Tonight We Are All Tunisian http://www.counterpunch.org/ridley01142011.html #SidiBouzid #Tunisia
Deadly riots engulf Tunisia as interim leader sworn in http://on.msnbc.com/gAqZMT
LA Times has this to say:
As such, the Internet has been the largest source of documentation of the protests, much of it provided by the demonstrators themselves, despite Tunisia's strict censorship of the Web.
Of course, given the nature of the Internet, information about the protests can range from propaganda to earnest documentation of the reality on the streets, and a critical, skeptical eye is needed to intelligently take in the flood and diversity of reports online.
The blog NDItech DemocracyWorks remarked on the situation, writing that despite remarkable levels of censorship the protesters "have been assisted by external online activists, notably the collective known as Anonymous. Allies of the regime have reportedly engaged equally enthusiastically, utilizing phishing, censoring, and hacking against activists."
[Images Credit: LA Times]
Comments
Post a Comment