SUMMARYDrone and missile strikes in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have damaged data centers, disrupted cloud services for millions, and permanently deleted some Amazon Web Services customer data. A live conversation is scheduled for November 17 with Joseph Jarnecki of the Royal United Services Institute to examine how cloud resilience affects national security and government cloud adoption after Ukraine’s experience with cyber and kinetic attacks.

An office building housing a data center in Kyivs Solomianskyi district is damaged following a strike by a Russian Geran-5 jet-powered attack drone during an aerial attack on the Ukrainian capital on September 23, 2026 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
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arstechnica.com
An office building housing a data center in Kyiv's Solomianskyi district is damaged following a strike by a Russian Geran-5 jet-powered attack drone during an aerial attack on the Ukrainian capital on September 23, 2026 in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Drone and missile strikes have inflicted unprecedented damage on data centers in Eastern Europe and the Middle East this year, disrupting cloud services for millions of people and permanently deleting some Amazon Web Services customer data. This trend represents a new concern for Big Tech companies—but also for governments and everyone else who depends on common digital services in modern life.

To explore what this all means for modern society’s reliance on cloud resilience, I will be hosting a live conversation titled "Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech" on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm ET with Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defense and security think tank. He leads RUSI’s work on how cloud services factor into national security and defense, along with tech sovereignty efforts.

Jarnecki has done extensive research on how Ukraine strengthened its cloud resilience with Western partners despite facing both cyberattacks and kinetic attacks at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, and explored what that means for NATO and European governments’ cloud adoption plans.

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