Thought Leadership
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that drone strikes directly hit two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates. The attacks are a consequence of the escalating conflict in the Middle East, following strikes conducted by the United States and Israel against Iran.
In the days prior to the announcement, reports had been circulating of severe service disruptions across AWS infrastructure in the region. While Amazon had acknowledged outages, the company remained tight-lipped about their precise cause and the full extent of the damage. Initial communications vaguely referenced “objects that struck the data center” without further elaboration. In an update to its public status page, AWS has now confirmed for the first time: the objects were drones, and they struck directly.
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. 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 closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.
Two availability zones down simultaneously
In the ME-CENTRAL-1 region (UAE), two facilities were hit directly. The impacts triggered fires, causing sprinkler systems to activate and damage additional equipment. Local authorities proactively cut power to bring the fires under control. In Bahrain (ME-SOUTH-1), a drone struck near a data center and caused physical damage to the infrastructure.
AWS regions are architected to tolerate the failure of a single Availability Zone, not two simultaneously. With mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 now offline in the UAE, two of the region’s three zones are down. Amazon reports “high error rates for data import and export,” particularly affecting its S3 storage service.
Recovery will take time
A quick fix is not in sight. AWS estimates at least one day of recovery time: beyond the physical infrastructure, cooling systems and power supply must also be restored. Coordination with local authorities and a thorough safety inspection are required before staff can re-enter the facilities.
In an unusually candid statement for a cloud provider, AWS wrote: “The ongoing conflict means that the operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable.” Customers running production workloads in the region are advised to consider acting now, backing up their data and migrating workloads to other AWS regions.
