During the increasing tensions in the Middle East, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reported that drone strikes have caused damage to two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one facility in Bahrain, impacting cloud services in the region.
In their most recent statement, AWS mentioned that the facilities experienced "physical harm to their infrastructure" due to the drone attacks, resulting in structural harm, power interruptions, and, in some instances, the activation of fire suppression systems that caused further water damage.
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The company stated that it is collaborating closely with local authorities and giving top priority to ensuring the safety of personnel during the restoration process.
AWS reported that two out of the three availability zones in the UAE were targeted by drones, resulting in significant impairment. The third zone is still operational, albeit with certain services being indirectly impacted.
Additionally, a strike in close proximity to Bahrain caused physical harm to infrastructure at one of its facilities. Earlier, AWS experienced service disruptions following an incident where unidentified objects damaged one of its data centers in the UAE, resulting in a fire. It was initially uncertain whether this event was connected to the ongoing conflict in West Asia, as reported.
The well-known EC2 service offered by the company, which delivers virtual server capacity, along with the S3 storage service and DynamoDB database service, were some of the applications affected by ‘increased error rates and reduced availability’ as a result of the incident.
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AWS has mentioned that they are currently focusing on implementing simultaneous recovery strategies, including both physical repairs and software-based solutions.
In addition to repairing the damaged infrastructure, the company is also implementing software mitigations that do not rely on the facilities being fully operational. Restoration of S3 and DynamoDB has been identified as a top priority due to the reliance of numerous other services on these platforms.
Furthermore, targeted software updates are being rolled out to minimize error rates across the various affected services. Nevertheless, AWS has issued a warning indicating that the ability to carry out certain recovery measures is limited by the current physical condition of the facilities. This implies that the complete restoration of specific services may necessitate repairs to the infrastructure. In light of the ongoing instability in West Asia, AWS has also advised that operational conditions in the region may continue to be volatile.
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Meanwhile, AWS recommended that customers with workloads in the impacted regions promptly backup their data, implement their disaster recovery protocols, restore from remote backups housed in different regions, modify applications to reroute traffic away from affected areas, and contemplate transferring workloads to alternate AWS regions.
The interruption occurred subsequent to synchronized US and Israeli airstrikes on various Iranian cities on February 28. These airstrikes aimed at military command posts, air-defense systems, missile installations, and critical regime infrastructure. Additionally, the strikes led to the death of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intensifying tensions within the region.