Amazon said on Monday (March 2) that drone strikes in the Middle East conflict damaged some of its data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting cloud services and prolonging recovery.
Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday (February 28), Reuters reported.
The strike on the UAE facility disrupted a major US tech company’s data centre for the first time, raising questions about Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
“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 impact to our infrastructure,”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in an update on its status page.
“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. 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.”
AWS had previously said “objects” had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to cut power to a cluster of Amazon data centres in the UAE, with restoration expected to take at least a day.
The outage affected financial institutions that use AWS services, a person with direct knowledge told Reuters, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
“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 added.
The AWS outage disrupted a dozen core cloud services, and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) informed via linkedin that its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, though it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.
Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News Middle East, based on image by tabass_art via Freepik
