Name: Does the Iran war put your internet at risk? | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T13:12:05.000Z
Duration: 3 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Does the Iran war put your internet at risk?

Since the escalation began, Iran's regime has repeatedly threatened to target what they call "enemy technology infrastructure." Here's the reality: U.S.

tech companies are the backbone of IT infrastructure in the Middle East.

They run giant data hubs in Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

In the seabed of the Strait of Hormuz lie fiber optic cables.

Think of them as the arteries of the global internet.

If they are damaged, the impact is felt beyond the Gulf region.

Targeted drone strikes can take regional data centers offline.

Recently, Amazon has reported new problems with its AWS cloud services due to Iranian drone activity in Bahrain.

In March, when Amazon data hubs in the UAE and Bahrain were hit, key apps and even major banks went down because even the data centers' backups failed.

Ride-hailing apps, food delivery vanished, and major banks went dark in the region.

The outages lasted for weeks, also because the conflict made it hard to bring in the hardware needed for the repairs.

But the fallout doesn't stop in the Gulf region.

The Gulf data hubs are crucial intersections.

Companies from Southeast Asia use them to handle their digital workload and to route their data to the rest of the world.

For that, they use undersea cable networks.

And these cables carry over 95% of global internet traffic.

When a key access point goes down, traffic reroutes to other cables, which can overload data highways and slow down everything.

When India and Pakistan were affected in early March, it wasn't a total blackout,

but there were huge spikes in latency, causing problems even in everyday applications.

In other parts of the world, like Europe or Latin America, such spikes were only minimal.

But some companies that rely on Amazon Web Services reported disruptions nevertheless.

Given that these undersea cables are so important, how much are they at risk?

As you can see on this map, several undersea cables run directly through the Strait of Hormuz.

Even if these cables have not been targeted directly so far, they are in danger right now, through sea mines and through warships or stuck oil tankers dropping anchors.

Normally, if a cable breaks, a specialized ship fixes it in a few days.

But you can't send a slow-moving, stationary repair ship into a minefield or a missile strike zone.

Both systems we mentioned—the data hubs powering our apps and the undersea cables handling the traffic—are built on the principle of redundancy.

Meaning, if one data center fails, there are others that can handle the load.

And if one cable breaks, the traffic can be routed another way.

But in 2026, we are learning the hard way: redundancy only works if the backup isn't in the line of fire too.

Bottom line: Even if you are not directly affected right now, data hubs and undersea cables will play a growing role in political conflicts in the future.