Amazon: Three facilities were damaged by drone attacks, and instability in the Middle East is likely to continue

On March 3, according to CNBC, Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS said late Monday that two of the company’s data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks, causing these facilities to go offline. The incident occurred last Sunday morning. AWS issued an announcement on its service health dashboard at the time, saying that the data center in the United Arab Emirates was hit by an "object", causing "sparks and fires." The company also said it was investigating power and internet connectivity issues at a facility in Bahrain.

Legend: Amazon AWS

The company’s latest update confirmed at 7:19 pm Eastern Time on Monday (8:19 Beijing time on Tuesday),The service outage was caused by a drone strike "related to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East."

AWS said: "In the UAE, two of our facilities were hit directly, and in Bahrain, a drone strike close to our facilities caused physical damage to our infrastructure. These attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power to the infrastructure and in some cases required firefighting operations, which caused additional water damage."

AWS said it is working to restore services in the region as quickly as possible, but due to the "nature of the physical damage involved," the recovery process is expected to take a long time. The company said it would provide an update on the situation before midnight local time on Monday and would release new information as soon as possible.

While it is repairing the physical damage to its data centers, AWS also said it is working to restore data access and service availability in affected areas, which can be done without the facility being fully brought back online.

AWS warned that instability in the Middle East is likely to continue, making operations "unpredictable."

AWS recommends that customers with workloads in the region consider taking steps to mitigate the impact of the conflict, including backing up data or migrating workloads to other AWS regions.

Earlier on Monday, Amazon alerted customers to potential delivery delays in the Middle East due to Iran launching missiles and drones into the region in response to U.S.-Israeli attacks.

Amazon posted a notice at the top of the company's platform page in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, reminding customers that "delivery times in your area will be extended."