Iran Fallout: Data Centers Hit, Misinformation Spreads

Several days into the conflict with Iran, a couple things stand out: The line between physical and cyber disruption continues to disappear, and misinformation can cause confusion even among those trained to be careful about the information they act on.

Reports that an AWS data center in the Middle East was hit by “objects that struck the data center creating sparks and fire” highlight a reality security teams rarely plan for: geopolitical conflict can take cloud infrastructure offline in ways no outage playbook anticipates.

If an availability zone disappears because of a missile strike, recovery isn’t minutes or hours, it’s a physical rebuilding. Meanwhile, confusion around viral claims that U.S. service members were warned to disable location services and uninstall apps like Uber and Snapchat shows how quickly misinformation spreads during conflict, and how real the risks of digital signals revealing physical operations can be.

Between cloud infrastructure becoming collateral damage and everyday apps leaking location data, the cyber and physical worlds are colliding in ways that are impossible to ignore.

Data Centers Damaged

This is one of the strangest cloud status updates I’ve ever seen come out of AWS. The phrasing is honestly pretty funny.

“Objects that struck the data center creating sparks and fire” is an extremely sanitized way to describe what likely happened. When you read it, you realize we’re basically talking about infrastructure getting caught in the blast radius of military strikes.

What stood out to me was that it wasn’t just one event. If one data center incident happens, that’s interesting. If multiple events start happening around the same time, that’s when you start thinking about what it means operationally, because at the end of the day, the cloud still runs in physical buildings that can be hit.

Threat Modeling the Asteroid

This whole thing reminds me of something from earlier in my career.

I used to run cloud and container security architecture and was part of the threat modeling team at a large bank. When we were mapping out worst-case scenarios, we would literally draw diagrams with an asteroid hitting a data center.

You’d draw a little rock on the whiteboard labeled “asteroid.”

It was partly tongue-in-cheek. The point wasn’t that we thought an asteroid was actually going to hit the facility. It was about pushing the scenario to its most extreme conclusion. What happens if the data center is just… gone?

We never really talked about missiles, maybe because most of the infrastructure we were thinking about was in the U.S., where that kind of risk felt abstract. Or maybe the asteroid was just a lighter way to frame it.

The AWS incident shows that the “asteroid scenario” isn’t so hypothetical anymore.

Failover Is the Real Story

The question people ask immediately is whether cloud providers have some kind of hardened or missile-resistant infrastructure. I honestly don’t know.

If any of their environments were going to have that level of protection, you’d probably look at something like GovCloud, the dedicated AWS environment built for U.S. government workloads. But it’s not like AWS is marketing “missile defense–grade data centers,” and even if they had something like that, it’s probably not something they’d advertise publicly.

When infrastructure is physically damaged, this isn’t a DNS outage where things come back online quickly. Those devices aren’t coming back anytime soon.

So the real story is resilience, multi-region architecture and how your systems behave when an entire availability zone goes dark.

The Location Data Story

Around the same time this was happening, another story started circulating online: Posts claiming to show guidance from U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) told service members to disable location services and uninstall apps like Uber, Snapchat, and food delivery services while operating in the Middle East.

The claim was that these services were compromised. I saw that warning from a few reputable sources and even had people in my DMs saying they received something similar through their units. So I shared it initially because, frankly, seeing “Uber” and “Snapchat” and “compromised” in the same sentence definitely gets your attention.

But later reporting indicated CENTCOM didn’t issue those warnings and said the claim about apps being compromised wasn’t accurate.

This is where things get messy during conflicts. Misinformation spreads incredibly fast, from all sides. Officials are also managing narratives, so sometimes statements are about controlling messaging as much as they are about confirming facts.

Why the Guidance Still Makes Sense

Even if the original message wasn’t official, the underlying advice actually makes a lot of sense.

Ride-share drivers aren’t trusted sources. Snapchat Maps broadcasts your location and food-delivery services create patterns that can reveal where people are and what they’re doing. Those signals can be used for open-source intelligence. It’s happened before.

In 2018, the Strava heat map incident exposed the locations of sensitive military bases because soldiers were uploading running routes that showed activity patterns.

So telling personnel not to broadcast location data during military operations isn’t exactly controversial advice.

The Bigger Lesson

Taken together, these stories highlight something security professionals need to think about more seriously: Cloud infrastructure isn’t separate from geopolitics. Digital platforms leak real-world signals. And regional conflict can affect both in ways that traditional security models don’t always consider.

For years we joked about asteroids wiping out data centers during threat modeling exercises. Now we might need to update the diagram, because the “asteroid scenario” has a new name: Missile.

I guess it’s not always DNS.