Drone Strikes Damage Amazon Data Centers in the UAE and Bahrain

Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit warned of prolonged disruptions to its services after revealing that drone strikes damaged three of its data centers in the Middle East in recent days.

Amazon Web Services Inc. said for the first time that drones had “directly struck” two facilities in the UAE. In Bahrain, a drone strike near another facility damaged infrastructure, it said.

“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 in a post. AWS customers are experiencing elevated error rates and degraded availability, the company said.

The damage and disruption shows the widening impact of a conflict that is reverberating across the Middle East, with blasts heard in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. The economic fallout has spread to global energy markets with oil prices spiking and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz all but grinding to a halt due to the risks.

Two of AWS’s three regional data center hubs “remain significantly impaired,” the company said in a post on its website at 4:19 a.m. UAE time on Tuesday. A third regional zone is operating normally, although “some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones,” it said.

AWS said it was working to restore the impacted facilities and recommended that customers in the Middle East back up data and potentially migrate workloads to alternative AWS regions. The company operates 123 zones of data centers across 39 regions globally.

“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 on its website. The company declined to comment beyond the public posts.

Photograph: Amazon AWS branding; photo credit: Chesnot/Getty Images