Ars Live: What drone attacks on data centers mean for modern life in the cloud

Drone and missile strikes have inflicted unprecedented damage on data centers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East this year, disrupting cloud services for millions of people and permanently deleting some Amazon Web Services customer data. This trend represents a new concern for Big Tech companies—but also for governments and everyone else who depends on common digital services in modern life.

To explore what this all means for modern society’s reliance on cloud resilience, I will be hosting a live conversation titled “Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech” on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm ET with Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defense and security think tank. He leads RUSI’s work on how cloud services factor into national security and defense, along with tech sovereignty efforts.

Jarnecki has done extensive research on how Ukraine strengthened its cloud resilience with Western partners despite facing both cyberattacks and kinetic attacks at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, and explored what that means for NATO and European governments’ cloud adoption plans.

This year, Jarnecki has written about Iran’s drone and missile strikes on Amazon data centers in the Middle East during the US-Israeli war with Iran, and the broader implications for governments and Big Tech. He has also commented on the impacts of Russia and Ukraine exchanging strikes on each other’s data centers.

For more background on the data center attacks that have transpired so far in 2026, you can see my previous Ars coverage of how the Iranian strikes left Amazon with months of repairs, and caused enough damage to result in the permanent loss of some AWS customer data.

I’ve also covered why Russia was not ready for the data center war it started with Ukraine, with the systematic Russian strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers provoking Ukrainian counterstrikes that damaged Russian government data centers and AI data centers owned by the Russian tech giant Yandex.

My conversation with Jarnecki will explore why data centers have become much more prominent military targets, whether defending or hardening data centers against drones and missiles is a realistic option, how cloud resiliency can be improved in wartime conditions, and the choices governments and cloud providers face in deploying data centers during an era of growing geopolitical risks.

You can watch the discussion live on YouTube on November 17 at 1 pm ET. We will also be fielding a few audience questions.

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