Amazon Web Services said late on Monday that three of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes over the weekend, disrupting core cloud services and prompting customers to consider moving workloads as conflict in the region intensifies.
The company said two facilities in the UAE were directly struck on Sunday morning, while a site in Bahrain sustained damage from a drone exploding nearby. In an update on its AWS health dashboard at 7:19 p.m. EST, it said the strikes caused structural damage and power disruption.
“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 outages affected several flagship services, including EC2 compute capacity, S3 cloud storage and the DynamoDB database platform. AWS said it had made “incremental progress” in restoring elements of DynamoDB and S3 but estimated that full recovery of power and connectivity would take at least a day.
The company warned that restoration could be prolonged “given the nature of the physical damage involved” and described the operating environment in the Middle East as unpredictable. It advised customers running workloads in the region to back up data and potentially migrate applications to alternative AWS regions elsewhere in the world.
According to an internal document reviewed by Business Insider, staff were evacuated from at least one affected facility after flooding and structural damage. The document stated that one site suffered a “direct impact” resulting in “major structural damage” and that water levels inside the building initially reached 3 to 4 centimetres before receding to less than 1 centimetre.
The same document reported that 14 EC2 server racks and five other production racks were knocked offline, while cooling systems and air handling units were impaired by power outages and mechanical failures. A second UAE facility was shut down after what the document described as an “indirect impact”, and entry was restricted pending government approval.
The disruptions come as Iran fires missiles and drones across the region in response to US and Israeli military activity, adding further strain to digital infrastructure relied upon by governments and businesses.
