Amazon: Three facilities damaged by drone attacks, Middle East instability likely to continue

Caption: Amazon AWS

TechCrunch reports that on Monday evening, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that two data centers in the UAE and one facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks, causing these facilities to go offline.

The incident occurred last Sunday morning. At that time, AWS posted on its Service Health Dashboard that the data centers in the UAE were hit by “objects,” causing sparks and fires. The company also stated that it was investigating power and network connectivity issues at a facility in Bahrain.

At 7:19 PM Eastern Time on Monday (8:19 AM Beijing Time on Tuesday), the latest update confirmed that the service outage was caused by drone attacks related to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

AWS stated: “In the UAE, our two facilities were directly hit. In Bahrain, a drone attack near our facilities caused physical damage to our infrastructure. These attacks caused structural damage, leading to power outages and, in some cases, fire suppression efforts, which resulted in additional water damage.”

AWS said it is working to restore services in the region as quickly as possible, but due to the “nature of physical damage,” the recovery process is expected to take a significant amount of time. The company stated it would provide the latest updates before midnight local time, and any new information will be released as soon as possible.

While repairing the physical damage to the data centers, AWS also said it is working to restore data access and service availability in the affected areas, which can be done without fully bringing the facilities back online.

AWS warned that instability in the Middle East is likely to persist, making operations “difficult to predict.”

AWS recommended that customers with workloads in the region consider taking measures to mitigate the impact of the conflict, including backing up data or migrating workloads to other AWS regions.

Earlier Monday, Amazon reminded customers that due to missile and drone attacks by Iran targeting the US-Israel region, there may be delivery delays in the Middle East.

Amazon posted notices at the top of its platform pages in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE, warning customers that “delivery times in your area will be extended.” (Author: Xiao Yu)