Drone Strikes Hit AWS Data Centers 'Due To' Middle East Conflict, Amazon Confirms

“Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes,” says Amazon.

Three AWS data centers in the Middle East were hit by drone strikes due to the current conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran as the region “remains unpredictable,” Amazon confirms.

“Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes,” said Amazon on its health status dashboard today.

Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were directly hit by drones which caused sparks and a fire at the facilities.

“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 impacts to our infrastructure,” Amazon said.

“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,” the tech giant added.

Environment In Middle East ‘Remains Unpredictable’

The drone strikes on AWS infrastructure disrupted many popular AWS services, including its EC2 compute, S3 cloud storage, and the DynamoDB database services, according to Amazon.

“The ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” Amazon said.

The drone strikes on Seattle-based Amazon’s data centers happened as Iran responded to U.S. and Israeli military activity in the country by firing missiles at other countries in the region.

The tech giant said it expects “recovery to be prolonged” given the nature of the physical damage to the data centers.

CRN reached out to AWS for comment but did not hear back by press time.

Drone Stikes Damage Servers, Amazon Staff Evacuated

Amazon staff was forced to evacuate the data centers and shut down access to at least one of the data centers—known as DXB62—after the strikes, according to a report by Business Insider.

Flooding occurred inside the data center where water levels reached over an inch at its peak. The damage caused by the drone strikes knocked out over a dozen Amazon EC2 cloud server racks, along with other production racks, according to the report.

A second AWS data center, dubbed DXB61, shut down on March 1 after an indirect impact that caused a small fire.

“We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” Amazon said.

Amazon’s March 3 Update; Customers Should ‘Enact Their Disaster Recovery Plans’

In Amazon’s latest service health update, the company said at around 5:00 a.m. PT that “the overall state of the region remains largely unchanged.”

The company said Amazon S3 is seeing improvement, but error rates remain high for DynamoDB and Amazon EC2.

The AWS Management Console is operational, though customers may continue to experience errors on certain pages as underlying services work through their recovery.

“We recommend that customers continue to retry requests where possible. We strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions,” Amazon said at around 5:00 a.m. PT today.

“Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions,” Amazon said. “For customers requiring guidance on alternate regions, we recommend considering AWS Regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, as appropriate for your latency and data residency requirements.”