Before dawn on March 1, 2026, while most of the Gulf was asleep, a swarm of Iranian Shahed drones crossed into the United Arab Emirates. They weren't headed for a military base. They weren't aimed at a port or an airstrip. They were looking for something far more valuable — and far more vulnerable. They found it. Two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE took direct hits. A third in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike. Structural damage. Fires. Power knocked out. Fire suppression systems flooded the hardware with water. Two of the three availability zones in AWS's entire Middle East region went dark simultaneously — something the system was never designed to survive. Banks went offline. Payments failed. Careem, the Gulf's dominant ride-hailing and delivery platform, went down. Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank — all reported disruptions. The UAE stock market halted. AWS quietly told its customers to migrate their workloads to othe...
So what impact did the day, that the internet blacked out in protest against SOPA and PIPA have on internet users and what are the volumes of traffic it affected. The 18th of Jan will always be remembered as the day when the internet went still and if you visited Wikipedia on that day all you got was a black screen. There were many websites that participated and to get a better idea check the infographic below.With tens of millions of participants, the blackout was the largest protest in history. Congress was flooded with over 400,000 calls – or 11.5 hours of phone calls per senator. Wikipedia's blackout constituted 1% of all tweets on the 18th. Source: frugaldad.com An original post by Sociolatte