AWS data centre outages confirmed: Drone attacks take down 3 Amazon sites in Gulf region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on March 1 confirmed that one of its data centres was struck by an object, causing sparks and fire in the facility. On March 2, the tech giant confirmed that three of its facilities were affected due to the Iran Drone strike in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a facility in Bahrain. 

According to the AWS health dashboard, AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1) are said to be “significantly impaired.” The two facilities in the UAE were directly struck, whereas the Bahrain facility was affected due to a drone strike in close proximity.

The company confirmed that “both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes,” stating the Middle East tension led to unpredictable operations. AWS further added that, “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.”

Amazon further stated that its customers are facing issues with “error rates and degraded availability for services” in Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and CLI applications, which manage compute, storage, databases, serverless processing, analytics, monitoring, and management.

The company is currently working to restore the services, although it states that the “recovery is to be prolonged” due to severe physical damage. It is planning to restore data access and service availability through software-based recovery that does not rely on facilities. AWS will reportedly provide an update on the situation by midnight.

However, due to the ongoing conflict in the region, the operation may become unpredictable, said the company. Lastly, it also alerts customers to an “extended delivery time in your area (Gulf region).”