Amazon Web Services' data centres in UAE, Bahrain damaged by drone strikes

According to company's latest update, the facilities suffered 'physical impacts to infrastructure' as a result of drone strikes, causing structural damage, power disruption

Amid escalating tensions in West Asia, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said drone strikes damaged two of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a facility in Bahrain, disrupting cloud services across the region.

 

According to the company's latest update, the facilities suffered “physical impacts to infrastructure” as a result of drone strikes, causing structural damage, power disruption and, in some cases, fire suppression efforts that led to additional water damage. The company said it is working closely with local authorities and prioritising personnel safety during recovery.

 

What exactly happened to the AWS facilities?

 

AWS said two of its three availability zones in the UAE were directly struck by drones and remain significantly impaired. The third zone continues to operate, although some services have been indirectly affected.  In Bahrain, a nearby strike caused physical damage to infrastructure at one of its site.

 

Earlier on Sunday, AWS had reported disruption to its services after unidentified objects struck one of its data centres in the UAE, causing a fire. However, at that time it was unclear if the incident was related to the ongoing conflict in West Asia, reported Bloomberg.

 

Which services have been affected?

 

Across the UAE and Bahrain regions, customers are experiencing disruptions across multiple AWS services. These include:

 

Amazon EC2 (virtual server capacity)

Amazon S3 (storage service)

Amazon DynamoDB (database service)

AWS Lambda

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon RDS

AWS Management Console and CLI

 

The company warned that recovery is likely to be prolonged “given the nature of the physical damage involved.”

 

What steps is AWS taking to restore services?

 

AWS said it is pursuing parallel recovery efforts, both physical and software-based. While repairs to the damaged infrastructure are under way, the company is deploying software mitigations that do not require facilities to be fully operational. AWS said restoring S3 and DynamoDB is a priority because many other services depend on them. Targeted software updates are also being deployed to reduce error rates across other affected services.

 

However, AWS cautioned that some recovery actions are constrained by the physical state of the facilities, meaning full restoration of certain services will require infrastructure repairs. Given continued instability in West Asia, AWS further warned that operations may remain “unpredictable.”

 

Meanwhile, AWS advised customers with workloads in the affected regions to back up data immediately, exercise their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, update applications to direct traffic away from impacted areas, and consider migrating workloads to alternate AWS regions.

 

The disruption follows coordinated US and Israeli airstrikes across multiple Iranian cities on February 28. The strikes targeted military command centres, air-defence systems, missile sites and key regime infrastructure. The strikes also resulted in the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, significantly escalating tensions in the region.