The damage and disruption shows the widening impact of a conflict that is reverberating across the Middle East, with blasts heard in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. The economic fallout has spread to global energy markets with oil prices spiking and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz all but grinding to a halt due to the risks.
Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit warned of prolonged disruptions to its services after revealing that drone strikes damaged three of its data centers in the Middle East in recent days.
Amazon Web Services Inc. said for the first time that drones had “directly struck” two facilities in the UAE. In Bahrain, a drone strike near another facility damaged infrastructure, it said.
“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 impact to our infrastructure,” Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in an update on its status page.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,” AWS said.
“We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved,” the company said in a post. AWS customers are experiencing elevated error rates and degraded availability, the company said.
The damage and disruption shows the widening impact of a conflict that is reverberating across the Middle East, with blasts heard in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. The economic fallout has spread to global energy markets with oil prices spiking and tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz all but grinding to a halt due to the risks.
Two of AWS’s three regional data center hubs “remain significantly impaired,” the company said in a post on its website at 4:19 a.m. UAE time on Tuesday.
A third regional zone is operating normally, although “some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones,” it said.
AWS said it was working to restore the impacted facilities and recommended that customers in the Middle East back up data and potentially migrate workloads to alternative AWS regions. The company operates 123 zones of data centers across 39 regions globally.
“Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” AWS said on its website. The company declined to comment beyond the public posts.
AWS had previously said “objects” had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to a cluster of Amazon data centers in the UAE, with restoration expected to take at least a day.
Financial institutions that use AWS services have been affected by the outage, one person with direct knowledge of the situation told Reuters, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” AWS said.
REGIONAL AI HUB
U.S. tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab chips for its data centers there.
“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,” Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
The AWS outage disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.