Amazon says 3 data centers damaged by drone strikes in Middle East

• Amazon's Middle East data centers were hit by drone strikes amid US-Iran tensions.
• Some sites faced fire, flooding, and major structural damage.
• Amazon said the situation "remains unpredictable."

Amazon said three of its data centers in the Middle East were damaged by drone strikes due to the US-Iran conflict in the region.

Two facilities in the United Arab Emirates sustained direct hits, while a third facility in Bahrain was damaged by a drone strike "in close proximity," the company said in an update on its AWS cloud service dashboard on Monday afternoon.

"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. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts," the company added in the update.

The infrastructure issues disrupted several AWS services, including the EC2 compute, S3 cloud storage, and the DynamoDB database offering, according to Amazon's latest update.

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

"We expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved," the company added. "We recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads to alternate AWS Regions."

The disruptions are happening as Iran responds to US military activity in the country by firing missiles at other countries in the region. Earlier on Monday, Business Insider reported that Amazon's e-commerce business halted and deliveries in Abu Dhabi due to the escalating tensions.

Cloud impact

An internal document reviewed by Business Insider offers more detail on the cloud fallout, revealing that Amazon evacuated staff and shut down access to at least one of the data centers after they experienced structural damage and flooding stemming from the attacks in recent days.

One of the sites suffered a "direct impact" and suffered "major structural damage," the document stated.

Flooding compounded the disruption. Water levels inside the facility initially reached 3 to 4 centimeters, or over an inch, before receding to less than 1 centimeter, the document showed.

The damage knocked 14 EC2 cloud server racks offline, along with five other "production" racks. Racks are the structures inside data centers that hold computer servers and other cloud-computing gear. EC2 refers to AWS's core cloud-computing service.

Cooling systems at the facility were also impaired. Air handling systems used to regulate temperature went offline due to power outages, and some suffered mechanical failures. Thirty cameras were monitoring the conditions, the document explained.

The data center is known as DXB62, likely referring to an AWS facility in Dubai, which has a major airport known as DXB.

A second AWS data center, called DXB61, shut down on Sunday after "indirect impact," the document also stated. A small fire was extinguished and no entry was allowed to the site without government approval. A third site, DXB60, experienced a WiFi outage, but the impact appeared localized, the document added.

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