Amazon Web Services Faces Disruptions Due to Drone Strikes in UAE

Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported on March 1 that one of its data centres was impacted by an object that caused sparks and resulted in fire within the facility. Following this, on March 2, the technology leader confirmed that three of its facilities experienced disruptions linked to the Iran Drone strike in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a facility located in Bahrain.

Impact on AWS Facilities in the Middle East

According to the AWS health dashboard, the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1) are reported as “significantly impaired.” The two UAE facilities were directly hit, while the Bahrain site was indirectly affected due to a nearby drone strike.

AWS confirmed that both impacted regions experienced physical damage to the infrastructure due to these drone strikes. They indicated that the escalating tensions in the Middle East have led to unpredictable operational circumstances. Additionally, AWS mentioned that these strikes resulted in structural damage, disrupted power supply to their infrastructure, and necessitated fire suppression activities, which led to further water damage.

Service Interruptions for AWS Customers

Amazon noted that its customers are facing challenges, including “error rates and degraded availability for services” across various platforms such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and CLI applications. These services are critical for managing compute, storage, databases, serverless processing, analytics, monitoring, and management tasks.

Plans for Service Recovery

The company is actively working on restoring services, although it has stated that the recovery process is expected to be drawn out due to extensive physical damage. AWS plans to restore data access and service availability through software-based recovery methods that do not rely on their facilities. An update on the situation is anticipated by midnight.

However, due to the ongoing conflict in the region, the company has warned that operational conditions may remain unpredictable. AWS has also alerted customers about potential “extended delivery times” in the Gulf region.