Amazon Data Center Facilities In The UAE And Bahrain Temporarily Suspend Operations Following Drone Strikes

Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s largest cloud computing platforms, has said that drone strikes damaged three of its data center facilities in the Middle East, which led to sites in the UAE and Bahrain going offline and causing prolonged service disruptions. 

The incidents occurred on Sunday morning, with AWS initially reporting on its health dashboard that “objects” had hit data centers in the UAE, creating “sparks and fire,” while the company investigated power and connectivity issues at a facility in Bahrain. In a later update, AWS confirmed that the outages were caused by drone strikes linked to what it described as the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” 

“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” AWS said. “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.” 

The damage led to service disruptions across several AWS offerings, with customers experiencing “elevated error rates and degraded availability.” Services affected included Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon DynamoDB. “We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved,” the company said. 

AWS has said that two of its three regional data center hubs in the Middle East “remain significantly impaired,” while a third regional zone continues to operate normally. However, the company noted that “some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones.” While repairs to the physical facilities are ongoing, AWS said it is also working to restore data access and service availability in the affected regions, even as it cautioned that conditions remain volatile. 

“Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” AWS said. The company advised customers with workloads in the region to take steps to mitigate disruption, including backing up data and potentially migrating workloads to alternative AWS regions.

AWS operates 123 availability zones across 39 regions globally.