As missiles hit AWS, just how safe are photos and videos stored on "the cloud"?

AWS, Amazon's cloud computing business that powers around at third of the internet, announced last week that three of its facilities in the UAE and Bahrain were knocked out by drone strikes.

The strikes, a result of the US/Israel-led action against Iran, were initially described as the facilities being hit by 'objects' before a little more clarity emerged.

So what got hit, and why worry?

An AWS (Amazon Web Services) data center was hit, creating 'sparks and fire', while indirect damage in Bahrain still caused power outages. The fires were then treated ''in some cases, required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage'' according to a report by the BBC.

Why worry? Well I know that some family members have experienced some slower downloads this week, though I can't say for sure these things are connected, and other people I know have had to flee the region so internet problems seem a little less significant by comparison to attempting to get out of the path of missiles and the shrapnel scattered by even successful air defence systems.

But the fact weapons were targeting these facilities says a lot about AWS's significance to the modern world (and that some perceive it as a backbone of the Western world).

AWS acts as the backbone for major platforms like Netflix, Reddit, Twitch, and LinkedIn, meaning a significant amount of daily web traffic passes through its servers. It is estimated that they hold a total of 500 trillion files, in the order of 2 zetabytes.

That means that the cloud storage server you use to store your files – your photos and videos – might well just be a 'front' for AWS systems, that they buy and use as and when they need them.

Amongst the big names that use AWS for data storage are:

• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Dropbox (though most is on its own infrastructure)
• SmugMug
• Apple (though it also has many of its own data centers)
• NordLocker

Even companies that prefer to rely on their own infrastructure where possible tend to be, well, big. Google Cloud Platform – the equivalent system that Google use – would also seem a logical target to anyone shooting at

All of that is to say that there is still a lot to be said to being the master of your own data, especially at the moment.

But there are backups, right?

AWS do not publicly share the exact details, but estimates suggest that there are around 900 centers worldwide. Each center will have its own multiple backups (but of course all a vulnerable at once in an event like a missile strike).

Systems divide these into zones – a big city like London might have three – and each piece of data is automatically copied into at least three zones, so three places, to protect against a catastrophic failure.

Worldwide companies might get extra copies by having more than one location, each getting the three copies.

The upshot is that data gets around 99.999999999% (famously called 11 nines) durability, and the system can even self heal if multiple centers fail simultaneously, automatically copying fragments to remaining centers. Losing an entire zone is a difficult situation though, and data can take minutes or hours to rebuild as data is shunted around the world.

So perhaps I should store some of my own data?

There is always a lot ot be said for having some of the best SSDs and the best external hard disks for local storage – they are much faster for immediate working too.