Iranian Strikes on Gulf Data Centres Disrupted African Apps Thousands of Miles Away

The case shows how the war in the Gulf is reaching digital services far from the fighting. Many African businesses run their apps, websites and records on servers outside the continent. When those facilities are hit, African users feel it.

Yango spokesperson Hadil Elmaki told Semafor that a partner company said in September that infrastructure damaged in Iranian attacks could no longer support Yango's work, forcing a move to a different data centre. "Moving interconnected systems between data centers is a complex process," Elmaki said. She described the disruptions as temporary, "affecting certain functions of our services in Côte d'Ivoire," and said they were intermittent problems rather than widespread outages. The company did not name the partner or say where the services had gone.

Ivorian users had passed around rumours that Ukrainian drone strikes on data centres in Russia caused the outages. Yango licenses technology from Russian company Yandex, whose Russian facilities were hit in October. The company said the Gulf move was to blame.

According to public records reviewed by Semafor, Yango runs some operations on Amazon's cloud, including servers in the UAE. In mid-September Amazon said it could not restore access to one of its three data centre zones in the country after Iranian drone strikes in March. Egyptian publisher EnterpriseAM, which also used UAE-based servers, said its website went offline for more than a day in March. It recovered by moving to another host and restoring missing data from its own systems.

War has disrupted the continent's connectivity before. Undersea cables in the Red Sea linking Africa and Europe were damaged in 2024, and Houthi attacks on commercial shipping made repairs harder. The fighting has also delayed new capacity: Meta has yet to build the southern Red Sea section of 2Africa, a cable designed to circle the continent.

"This is the new line of warfare," Jane Munga, a technology policy researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Semafor. "Something happening across the world can affect Africa."

More African companies are moving to the cloud, but there are few servers in-country, so much of that hosting is abroad, said Amreesh Phokeer, research director at the Internet Society. He framed it as a choice for governments: "Do they invest locally to build more resilience, or do they create even more dependence on the outside?"

Several governments are already building at home in the name of digital sovereignty. Mauritania launched a national cloud service for public administration in June. In July, Gabon opened a data centre built by pan-African technology company ST Digital to host government and business services. Demand for AI is adding pressure: about 1,250 companies applied to the first cohort of the Askya AI Growth Platform, a programme for African AI startups run by Lagos-based Askya Investment Partners that began in October.

The experts warned that local data centres alone will not solve the problem. "What if the war is local?" Munga said, arguing for a strategy built on diversification. Phokeer pointed to Ukraine, where the internet held up after Russia's 2022 invasion because traffic was not concentrated in a few sites and could be routed through several neighbouring countries. "Good practice says you shouldn't keep your data in just one place," he said.

For Gulf states marketing themselves as regional hubs for cloud and AI compute, the episode raises a question customers in Africa and elsewhere are likely to ask: how operators will keep services running if facilities in the region are hit again.