As someone who has lived most of his life in Iran, I ask those who find any alignment with the IRGC to please understand that it is a religiously fanatic military and terrorist group.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
Radars and bases along the path of travel from Iran to Israel have been progressively degraded. Various interceptor types also have low stockpiles at present. I'm absolutely not an expert keeping well-informed, but my understanding is that Jordan's recent losses mean much of the path is now relatively clear of air defenses, and Israel would have to mount most/all defenses from their own territory for the first time. But Israel is at-present not engaging in the war, preferring to let US do the work, as a minister recently stated. Regardless, it may be attacked, depending on IDF actions in Lebanon.
Iran also isn't hitting Israel because they know Israel will go after Tehran and the regime more directly. They were the ones to target the Basij police, industrial and steel plants, government buildings etc. America is mostly constraining itself to bombing the coast and military assets, with a focus on the strait.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
Iran has recently demonstrated the ability to execute accurate strikes in Jordan. If it can do so in Jordan, it can do so in Israel once Israeli air defences are similarly degraded. Doubly so because many missiles meant for Israel were intercepted by Jordan.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.
Forgive the uninformed question, but doesn't Saudi Arabia also have significant armed forces? Given that Iran has closed the Straights of Hormuz and attacked several other Arab states, and has conducted strikes in Saudia Arabia itself, wouldn't that give Saudia Arabia a solid reason to strike back?
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
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.
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.
Lack of visual hierarchy. Lots of use of bold text to make numbers stand out, without bolding the corresponding labels. Reliance on heavily-saturated primary colors. Limited attention paid to alignment.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
An adjoining substation to BAH53 had one of it's two main buildings damaged/destroyed about 2026-07-16 per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-data-center-power-substation-bahrain-jul-16th-2026-142024
Then about 2026-07-22 BAH53 itself was damaged/destroyed per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-services-bahrain-jul-22nd-2026-142112
Possibly the least defended of the three sites as there is no air/missile defence battery in between this site and Iran.
No media reports about this data centre being attacked previously. Possibly the safest of the three as there are at least two (probably three) air/missile defence batteries in between this site and Iran.
Apparently the Batelco DC.1 data centre adjoining (and apparently critical to) BAH55 was damaged/destroyed about 2026-04-01 per https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk28nj0lrjo _or_ the adjoining substation to these two facilities was damaged/destroyed -- news articles are hard to follow as to what exactly might have been damaged and the extent of damage caused.
Middle ground for defence with one or two (maybe three) air/missile defence batteries between this site and Iran, depending on where drones/missiles are launched from.
If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in Ukraine, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
Play with fire... if you sell services to store intelligence on occupied population to the occupant, and have no qualms about it, should anyone care you get your shit bombed from time to time? Just comes with the territory. Aside from hating how much real resources are wasted on pointless wars and assholery between people, at least this is fair.
It seems only fair that Iran's frozen funds be permanently seized and used to pay for damages caused to Amazon, ships, and other facilities it targeted during the war.
And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?
Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.
At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
As someone who has lived most of his life in Iran, I ask those who find any alignment with the IRGC to please understand that it is a religiously fanatic military and terrorist group.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
Good thing tjat Trump and Netanyahu ensured the IRGC will stay in power for many years to come, then
Yes. American attack on Iran did not help anything though, and threw a lot of countries and people into pretty bad situation.
Hard to like anyone in this situation.
lol sure sure....they bombed people Gaza.
You sure your not talking about Israel? lol
A more nuanced take might be that, in certain situations, there can be more than one bad actor. Have you considered that?
I think what they mean is that IRGC funded Hamas operations.
Almost no one finds "alignment" with the IRGC.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
Jew
After this strike, the only AWS region in the ME that remains operational is the one in Tel Aviv (a bit ironic if you ask me).
UAE has been down for months, Bahrain is now offline, Saudi Arabia is still under construction.
not really ironic given the billions of dollars israel gets to defend themselves. Iran, and most of the modern world, are not idiots.
Radars and bases along the path of travel from Iran to Israel have been progressively degraded. Various interceptor types also have low stockpiles at present. I'm absolutely not an expert keeping well-informed, but my understanding is that Jordan's recent losses mean much of the path is now relatively clear of air defenses, and Israel would have to mount most/all defenses from their own territory for the first time. But Israel is at-present not engaging in the war, preferring to let US do the work, as a minister recently stated. Regardless, it may be attacked, depending on IDF actions in Lebanon.
Iran also isn't hitting Israel because they know Israel will go after Tehran and the regime more directly. They were the ones to target the Basij police, industrial and steel plants, government buildings etc. America is mostly constraining itself to bombing the coast and military assets, with a focus on the strait.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
I would be worried about staying in the Jumeirah Burj Al Arab, these days.
I suspect that Iran knows that going after Dubai would upset a lot of American (and Sunni) billionaires.
The north of Israel has been completely evacuated. But yeah Iran didn't do any damage. lol
Iran has recently demonstrated the ability to execute accurate strikes in Jordan. If it can do so in Jordan, it can do so in Israel once Israeli air defences are similarly degraded. Doubly so because many missiles meant for Israel were intercepted by Jordan.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.
Forgive the uninformed question, but doesn't Saudi Arabia also have significant armed forces? Given that Iran has closed the Straights of Hormuz and attacked several other Arab states, and has conducted strikes in Saudia Arabia itself, wouldn't that give Saudia Arabia a solid reason to strike back?
last time ksa went to war it was against yemen, and didnt go very well.
Despite the destruction, me-south-1 still has more nines than us-east-1
this datacenter appears to be 99.99 percent destroyed
There's usually more than one datacenter in an AZ.
I don't know if this is serious or if it's a joke.
Won’t get a red dot until they pour molten lava over it.
Lmao
1. Wow this is a headline.
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
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.
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.
Lack of visual hierarchy. Lots of use of bold text to make numbers stand out, without bolding the corresponding labels. Reliance on heavily-saturated primary colors. Limited attention paid to alignment.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
> 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.
The entire houseofsaud.com site appears to be LLM-generated, I wouldn't trust a single thing it says.
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'
I wouldn't trust a single thing it says even if it was human-generated.
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.
Part of it is the clash with the pages UI. Dark black cards in the middle of a light theme.
This is the claude code frontend-skill.
The "Conflict Pulse" status dot is really the shit cherry on top.
How long will it take to rebuild those datacenters given the supply shortage? Are we talking like 3+ years?
Shows unavailable, last status update 30th April https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
I learned about it from HN, a while ago.
Oftentimes discussions get killed not because the source article is bad but because the discussions themselves devolve into flame bait/war?
Having reviewed the comments I don’t see any indication of why it would be flagged for the discussion.
Probably somebody flagged it for being too well moderated and therefore not agreeing enough with their side.
> 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".
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.
Sat Photo https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-service...
me-south-1 is in fact, quite possibly permanently, "offline".
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.
I'm surprised you'd think sending civilians into a war zone is a good thing.
War zones tend to have lots of people in already, and many of them really want a job.
1.5M civilians already live in Bahrain. This usage makes the term "war zone" meaningless.
AWS's 3 data centres in me-south-1 are:
BAH53 (Manama): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492345589
BAH54 (Zallaq): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1359931661 BAH55 (Hamala): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/956069872 If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in Ukraine, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
I wonder how the real House of Saud would feel about having their name used by some random news website? Not amused, probably...
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes
I guess Anthropic is safe, since they aren't military infrastructure
Play with fire... if you sell services to store intelligence on occupied population to the occupant, and have no qualms about it, should anyone care you get your shit bombed from time to time? Just comes with the territory. Aside from hating how much real resources are wasted on pointless wars and assholery between people, at least this is fair.
Soo.. Is this bullish for the stock price or nah?
It seems only fair that Iran's frozen funds be permanently seized and used to pay for damages caused to Amazon, ships, and other facilities it targeted during the war.
Who, if anyone, is Iran allowed to retaliate against?
The US started this. Amazon is an American companies with many governmental and military contracts. Why would it not be a valid target?
How many Iranian hospitals, schools, bridges, data centers, etc have been destroyed?
And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?
Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.
The US started the war though and have very recently been targeting civilian infrastructure as well. So by your logic should be replacing it.
What do the Americans get for their relatives murdered by IRGC throughout the years?
What do the Iranians get for us overthrowing their government in the 50s? (we are not the good guys here)
There is a difference between overthrowing the government and blowing up civilian targets.
At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
You can say the same thing about Iran. They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.
Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe, so what’s happening now is expected.
You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/g-s1-134037/why-is-it-so-hard... (“… the U.S. has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire.”)
Let's do it fairly.
Like 100s (?) of Americans killed by Iran ever.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
> Let's do it fairly.
How would it work? Do you expect a 1:1 casualty list? 1:1 list of events? Should the US citizens allow for a coup on US soil carried out by the IRGC?