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...
Generally in the social interwebs, companies creating campaigns automatically assume they're sharing good news. Not taking into account worst-case scenarios in people's lives. When Facebook rolled out 'Year in Review' it reminded people of the events of 2014 and although good for a large number of users, did not go down too well for many. People's 'Year in Review' slideshows reminded them of death, divorces and other tragedies they might have faced in 2014. Facebook has recognized the mistake and has taken ownership though. Product manager Jonathan Gheller has apologized to Eric Meyer (whose story about his daughter's death first drew attention to the problem) for the mistake and declared that the "Year in Review" team "can do better" in the future. You would think a large company like Facebook might have factored this into their creative designs but as we can see that did not happen.
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