IRGC Claims It Destroyed Amazon's Bahrain Data Center

(houseofsaud.com)

83 points | by thisislife2 4 hours ago

9 comments

  • throwaw12 17 minutes ago
    I feel for both, people who where hosting there not expecting this war and this attack and the attackers, because they didn't attack just because they wanted but attacked as a response as stated earlier.

    Winner: US military industrial complex + Israel

    Losers: Everyone else

  • tailscaler2026 1 hour ago
    Despite the destruction, me-south-1 still has more nines than us-east-1
    • lukewarm707 55 minutes ago
      this datacenter appears to be 99.99 percent destroyed
      • inigyou 8 minutes ago
        There's usually more than one datacenter in an AZ.
  • loufe 1 hour ago
    As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.
    • cartermatic 1 minute ago
      They're definitely Claude generated. People at my last company loved to generate pages & stat cards with Claude and they all had this exact same style.
    • meshweaver 14 minutes ago
      They are certainly LLM-generated. I'm sure it's been done, but I would love to see a comprehensive look into what it is exactly that makes a UI seem LLM-generated.

      From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.

      I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.

      • KronisLV 0 minutes ago
        > I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.

        Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.

    • decimalenough 1 hour ago
      The entire houseofsaud.com site appears to be LLM-generated, I wouldn't trust a single thing it says.
      • Neil44 55 minutes ago
        Used for translation maybe? I tried to scan to see which plugins, but it had two responses for me, and the second one was 'off'
      • csomar 1 hour ago
        I wouldn't trust a single thing it says even if it was human-generated.
    • hagen8 13 minutes ago
      This is the claude code frontend-skill.
    • tyleo 1 hour ago
      Part of it is the clash with the pages UI. Dark black cards in the middle of a light theme.
  • Neil44 1 hour ago
    Shows unavailable, last status update 30th April https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
    • gortok 1 hour ago
      Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.

      Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587

      • appreciatorBus 1 hour ago
        > Why would it be flagged?

        Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.

        • throwaw12 13 minutes ago
          > and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war

          Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?

          • inigyou 7 minutes ago
            Israel has a right to exist. Please don't spam HN with terroristic comments saying it doesn't.
          • xenospn 7 minutes ago
            I love how you immediately proved their point while trying to prove them wrong.
          • TimorousBestie 5 minutes ago
            > Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?

            It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.

            There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.

      • cobolcomesback 32 minutes ago
        There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.

        This is just one of the popular ones, but there were also tens of posts about it with only 1-10 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641788

        Here’s another popular one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503

        The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.

      • oneplane 1 hour ago
        It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.

        As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.

        • orwin 53 minutes ago
          The only reason we knew about it is that it was one of our network output 'node', but I don't think I've read anything about it in generalist medias
        • malfist 1 hour ago
          Are you implying that something that gets reported on, shouldn't be on HN? Also, clearly it wasn't that extensive if GP hadn't heard about it
          • sjs382 53 minutes ago
            I learned about it from HN, a while ago.
      • antonymoose 1 hour ago
        Oftentimes discussions get killed not because the source article is bad but because the discussions themselves devolve into flame bait/war?
        • gortok 1 hour ago
          Having reviewed the comments I don’t see any indication of why it would be flagged for the discussion.
          • SonOfLilit 1 minute ago
            Probably somebody flagged it for being too well moderated and therefore not agreeing enough with their side.
        • spacebacon 59 minutes ago
          [dead]
      • dmurray 1 hour ago
        > Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.

        Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.

        Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".

    • wilburx3 16 minutes ago
    • self 1 hour ago
      There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.
    • lukewarm707 58 minutes ago
      me-south-1 is in fact, quite possibly permanently, "offline".
      • londons_explore 15 minutes ago
        I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.
        • SG- 8 minutes ago
          I'm surprised you'd think sending civilians into a war zone is a good thing.
          • londons_explore 5 minutes ago
            War zones tend to have lots of people in already, and many of them really want a job.
  • pbiggar 13 minutes ago
    > The AWS strikes did not emerge from an improvised targeting decision. On March 31, 2026, the IRGC formally declared eighteen US technology companies “legitimate military targets” — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla, Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm.

    Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.

    • pbiggar 11 minutes ago
      Fwiw, there is tons of evidence of these company's complicity with Israel's occupation (it's probably a much longer list if we want to look at those that enable the US' wars).

      Most recently the UN report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-...

      • pbiggar 9 minutes ago
        Relevant section:

        Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]

    • drstewart 7 minutes ago
      Glad you think that, cofounder of "tech for Palestine".

      Now let's hear your thoughts on the designation of dual-use targets in Gaza by Israel.

  • nttylock 28 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • i_idiot 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • catlover76 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • hn7jmxa7oc 26 minutes ago
    Not sure I agree but you made me think