UPDATED Multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) availability zones in the Middle East are experiencing outages or degraded connectivity after objects struck a UAE facility, as Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks hit targets across the Gulf.
The disruptions came a day after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran. At 1251 UTC, Amazon began investigating a disruption to its mec1-az2 availability zone in the United Arab Emirates.
Roughly five hours later, Amazon revealed that the facility “was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire.” Power to the facility was cut by local authorities to contain the blaze.
Amazon hasn’t specified what those objects might be, but the datacenter appears to have been caught in the crossfire between the US and Iranian forces in the region. In response to US and Israeli strikes on Iran, Tehran has launched a series of missile and drone attacks across the Gulf region, hitting or targeting US military bases and other sites in countries including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar.
By 1846 UTC, power disruptions across the UAE had spread to another Amazon availability zone (mec1-az3), significantly impacting services like S3 storage, which the cloud provider notes is only designed to shake off the loss of a single zone within a region. With two of three zones impaired, “customers are seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress.”
According to Amazon, work is continuing to restore service to the datacenters, but it notes that this could take “at least a day, as it requires repair of facilities, cooling and power systems, coordination with local authorities, and careful assessment to ensure the safety of our operators.”
Amazon is also facing disruptions at its mes1-az2 availability zone to the north in Bahrain, after the facility suffered a “localized power issue,” around 0656 UTC on Monday. As of Amazon’s last report at 1423 UTC Monday morning, the company noted power to the facility had “not yet been restored,” and that recovery could take at least a day while repairs were made.
Much like Amazon’s UAE datacenters, the disruptions are likely related to Iranian strikes on targets in Bahrain.
According to multiple reports, Iranian armaments struck the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain on Saturday. A high-rise building in Bahrain was also struck by what’s believed to be an Iranian drone.
Disruptions to Amazon’s facilities have had knock-on effects for software-as-a-service providers in the region. On Sunday, data management firm Snowflake attributed service disruptions in the region to the AWS outage in the UAE.
Amazon declined a request for comment and directed us back to AWS’ Health Dashboard for updates.
Amazon is by no means the only datacenter operator within striking distance of Iran or its allies as the US continues to wage war in the region.
Over the past decade, the Middle East has emerged as a hub for big tech as many wealthier nations in the region look to diversify their economies away from reliance on petroleum. Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular have invested heavily in artificial intelligence, partnering with the likes of Nvidia, AMD, OpenAI, Cerebras, and others to expand their datacenter capacity in the region.
According to DataCenterMap, which maintains a database of bit barns around the world, there are roughly 326 datacenters across the Middle East, with the largest concentration centered in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Most of these are run by local operators, including the UAE’s Khazna Data Centers and Gulf Data Hub, and Saudi Arabia’s Center3 to name a few. However, over the past decade, US cloud titans have steadily expanded their influence in the region.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle all operate facilities in nations that, according to the Associated Press, are now under bombardment by Iranian forces. Thus far, only Amazon’s status pages report outages related to the conflict in the region. ®
UPDATED AT 03:20 UTC, March 3rd to add
AWS has confirmed that drone strikes are the cause of disruptions at its Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1).
In a 12:19AM UTC update to its status page, AWS said two of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” by a drone.
In Bahrain, “a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure.”
Some of the incidents caused fires that set off datacenter sprinklers, damaging equipment.
The cloud giant advised customers that “ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable” and recommended “customers with workloads running in the Middle East consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads to alternate AWS Regions.” – Simon Sharwood
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