War damage, air traffic disruption, and a storage shortage expose the cost of treating resilience as someone else's problem.
Amazon Web Services said last week that war damage to its Middle East infrastructure had permanently destroyed resources and data hosted exclusively in its now badly named Bahrain Availability Zones.
Customers without copies elsewhere no longer had their data.
The episode also underlines a familiar but neglected lesson: resilience within one cloud region is not the same thing as maintaining an independent backup elsewhere.
You buy it, then to anyone who smugly invokes the 3-2-1 backup rule.
5 sentences from our version of the report,
chosen to cover it. Nothing here is written; every line is in the article below.
How
Summarized version
An outage of the UK air traffic control system in September was reportedly triggered by a military aircraft filing an incompatible flight plan. There is no global market where AWS, NATS, or your organization can buy the data equivalent of war-risk insurance.
Headline check
There is nothing in this headline a machine can check against the report: no figure, no name and no quotation.
War damage, air traffic disruption, and a storage shortage expose the cost of treating resilience as someone else's problem.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Amazon Web Services said last week that war damage to its Middle East infrastructure had permanently destroyed resources and data hosted exclusively in its now badly named Bahrain Availability Zones. The damage overwhelmed the resilience built into the region. Customers without copies elsewhere no longer had their data.
If systems designed to withstand war cannot cope with sustained physical attacks, civilian bit barns have little chance. The episode also underlines a familiar but neglected lesson: resilience within one cloud region is not the same thing as maintaining an independent backup elsewhere.
Physical destruction is not the only threat. An outage of the UK air traffic control system in September was reportedly triggered by a military aircraft filing an incompatible flight plan. Presumably Flight Lieutenant Bobby Tables has been reprimanded.
The apparent failure to validate the flight plan data was not the worst of it. Nor was there a backup of the live data, supposedly because of the "vast amounts" involved.
If your system produces too much data to back up, you had better be running a particle collider or a giant telescope. More charitably, backup strategies are complicated, expensive, and difficult to test.
AI datacenter operators are swallowing much of the available capacity, with drives selling out faster than tickets for a Taylor Swift tour. Western Digital had allocated its entire 2026 hard-drive production run by mid-February. You buy it, then to anyone who smugly invokes the 3-2-1 backup rule.
Shortened to 1 minute
of reading, this version reads 14.3 on the Niral Score.
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