Amazon said on Monday that some of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks in the Middle East conflict, disrupting cloud services and causing an “extended” recovery.
Iran on Saturday barraged Gulf states with drones and missiles in retaliation for the U.S. and Israeli attack that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
The attack on the UAE facility marks the first time a major US tech company’s data center has been disrupted by military action. This calls into question the pace of Big Tech’s expansion in the region.
“Two of our facilities were directly hit in the United Arab Emirates, and a drone attack in close proximity to one of our facilities in Bahrain physically impacted our infrastructure,” Amazon’s cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in an update on its status page.
“These attacks caused damage to structures, disrupted power supplies to infrastructure, required firefighting efforts in some cases, and caused additional water damage,” AWS said.
“We are working to restore full service availability as soon as possible, but given the nature of the physical damage, we expect recovery to take some time,” it added.
AWS previously said an “object” started a fire on Sunday that ultimately forced authorities to shut off power to Amazon’s data centers in the UAE, which was expected to take at least a day to restore.
Financial institutions using AWS services are affected by the outage, a person with direct knowledge of the situation told Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
“Despite efforts to restore these facilities, the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains uncertain as conflict continues in the region,” AWS said.
Regional AI hub
The US tech giant is positioning the UAE as a regional hub for the artificial intelligence computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft announced in November that it plans to invest $15 billion in the UAE by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips in its data centers in the country.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said last week: “In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies have targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner countries. In the computing era, these attackers may also target data centers, the energy infrastructure that supports computing, and fiber choke points.”
Microsoft, Google and Oracle, which also operate facilities in the United Arab Emirates, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The AWS outage disrupted more than a dozen core cloud services, and the company advised customers to back up critical data and migrate operations to servers in unaffected AWS Regions.
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platform and mobile apps were unavailable due to a region-wide IT outage, but the outage was not directly related to the AWS incident.
(Reporting by Shubham Kalia and Aditya Soni in Bengaluru, Mrinmay Dey in Mexico City and Hadeel Al Sayegh in Dubai; Additional reporting by Rajveer Singh Pardesi and Gnaneshwar Rajan; Editing by Shreya Biswas, Devika Syamnath and Muralikumar Anantharaman)
