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...
Stephen Fry announced on his Twitter account that will be missing from his account for about three months. He is doing this in order to concentrate on writing his Biography. In a mini-blog farewell note. He says some people can write with distractions but he cannot and needs quietness and peace. He will be back in a while once he is done writing. Well now, this is a sort of farewell . An au revoir more than an adieu but a valediction all the same. This morning I switch off most of my connections with the outside world, for I have work to do. I must deliver a book to my publishers by the end of April or my soul and testicles will be forfeit. Some people can write with ease in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Up a tree, on a bus, in a log cabin, a steamy-windowed café or a tropical beach. Some don’t mind noise, distraction or a broken up day. I, unhappily, am not made of this material. I need peace, absolute peace, an empty diary and zero distraction. I enter a kind of w...