Amazon said on Monday it had experienced a "service outage" in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) region in Bahrain amid the current conflict in the Middle East, the second time in a month that the company's operations have been affected in this round of war.
An Amazon spokesperson told Reuters that the outage was related to local drone activity in response to a Reuters inquiry about the situation, and as of Monday evening, AWS had not updated its status page on the impact.
Amazon has not yet responded to Reuters' questions about whether the Bahrain facility was directly targeted by drones or was simply affected by a nearby strike.
The company said it was assisting customers in migrating operations to other AWS regions to maintain services during the recovery process, but did not disclose further details such as the extent of the damage or the expected duration of the outage.
"As the situation evolves, and as we have previously advised, we ask that customers who still have workloads in the affected areas continue to migrate to other locations," Amazon said in a statement late Monday.
AWS is the cloud computing arm of Amazon. It is the infrastructure on which many well-known websites and key systems of governments around the world rely on, and is also the main source of the company's profits.
This is the second time drone activity has impacted AWS’ regional operations in Bahrain since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began.
Earlier this month, AWS reported that its facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates experienced outages due to Iranian attacks, and the company was working to recover and shift computing workloads to other regions.
Reuters reported earlier this month that the strike on the UAE facility was the first time military action had directly disrupted operations at a major U.S. technology company's data centers, and at the time Amazon said it expected recovery to be a "long-term" process due to structural damage.
"These strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power to our infrastructure and in some cases required the activation of fire suppression measures, resulting in additional water damage," AWS said on its status page.
Amazon also said at the time that the Bahrain region had been affected by a drone that exploded at close range to one of its facilities.