Amazon has confirmed that three AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain were severely damaged by drone attacks , causing a widespread service outage that continues to affect dozens of cloud computing services. The attacks are part of an Iranian response to US-Israeli military actions in the Middle East, signaling a new era of threats to the global cloud infrastructure.
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According to Amazon , drone attacks disrupted operations in the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1) . The company said that in the United Arab Emirates , two facilities were directly hit, while in Bahrain , a drone attack near one of the facilities caused physical damage to the infrastructure. This is the first recorded case of a direct physical attack on hyperscale cloud facilities worldwide.
The attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power to infrastructure, and in some cases required firefighting activities that resulted in additional water damage. Amazon is working closely with local authorities and is prioritizing the safety of its employees during recovery efforts. The complexity of the recovery is increased by the fact that fire suppression systems were automatically activated, causing additional damage to sensitive equipment in AWS data centers.
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Impact on AWS data centers and cloud services
Currently, three availability zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) in the United Arab Emirates remain “significantly impacted,” while a third (mes1-az2) in Bahrain is still impacted by a “local power issue.” Amazon is currently restoring physical infrastructure while also working on “multiple software-based recovery paths” that do not require a full restore of the underlying facilities. Availability zones are isolated clusters of data centers within regions, designed to provide high availability and fault tolerance.
The drone attacks began on March 2 at 12:51 UTC , when AWS first detected issues in the mec1-az2 availability zone in the United Arab Emirates . The company initially reported “objects” hitting a facility, causing sparks, fires, and sprinkler systems that caused water damage. The timing of the attacks, at approximately 4:30 a.m. local time , suggests strategic planning to minimize personnel presence.
The company is also prioritizing the restoration of services and tools that will allow customers to back up and move data and applications out of the affected regions. Amazon advised affected customers to back up their data and move workloads to AWS that are not affected by these issues. The outage also affected third-party service providers, with Snowflake reporting direct impacts to its data management services.
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Recommendations for crisis management and data migration
Amazon recommends that customers implement disaster recovery plans, restore from remote backups stored in other regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions. For customers who need guidance on alternative regions, the company recommends considering AWS regions in the United States , Europe , or Asia Pacific , depending on their latency and data residency requirements. Geographic diversification is critical to addressing such contingencies.
Source: bleepingcomputer
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