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...
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin has sent letters to thirty tech companies including Amazon, Facebook and Twitter asking them to detail their human rights practices in China after Google threatened to pull out of China. The Democratic Senator of Illinois who is chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on Human Rights and Law also said there would be a hearing in February on Global Internet Freedom. He said the hearing would feature companies like Google and their business practices in internet restricted countries. Durbin's letter comes nearly three weeks after Google Inc. said it would stop censoring search results in China and threatened to pull out of the country altogether after uncovering a hacking attack that emanated from China and attempts to snoop on dissidents. Durbin said he is gathering information about the conduct of other big technology companies to prepare for a hearing on Google's actions in China. The hearing will also examine the Global Network Initiative, a ...