Data Centres & Networks

AWS loses another data centre in UAE and one in Bahrain to drone strikes

AWS loses another data centre in UAE and one in Bahrain to drone strikes

Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed on Monday that two of its data centres in the UAE and one in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes as the Middle East conflict involving Iran, the US and Israel widens.

Over the weekend, AWS reported that its mec1-az2 Availability Zone in AWS’ ME-Central-1 Region was down after it was “impacted by objects”, resulting in a fire that forced the facility to shut off power. At the time, AWS didn’t directly link the damage to strikes carried out by Iranian forces in Dubai.

The latest update from the AWS health dashboard reports that two data centres in its ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region – mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 – were directly hit by drone strikes. Meanwhile, one data centre in the ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) Region was damaged by a drone strike in close proximity to the facility.

“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,” AWS said.

AWS said customers across both regions are experiencing higher error rates and degraded availability for services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and CLI. While its third Availability Zone in the UAE is operating normally, services that leverage the affected zones have also been impacted.

AWS lists 25 services disrupted by the outages and 34 services degraded.

Alongside efforts to get the physical data centres up and running again, AWS is also pursuing several software-based recovery paths that don’t depend on those facilities being fully online.

For example, AWS is working to restore data access and service availability for Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB through software mitigations, including deploying updates to enable S3 to operate within the current infrastructure constraints and remediating impaired DynamoDB tables to restore read and write availability for dependent services.

AWS said it’s focusing on those services first, since restoring them will enable more AWS services to recover.

However, AWS cautioned, “While these software-based mitigations can address many of the service-level impacts, some recovery actions are constrained by the physical state of the affected facilities — meaning that full restoration of certain services will require the underlying infrastructure to be repaired and brought back online.”

AWS added the caveat that the ongoing conflict has made the broader operating environment in the Middle East unpredictable.

“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,” AWS said. “We recommend customers exercise their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions.”

The US and Israel has been bombing Tehran since Saturday, with the initial strike killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials. Meanwhile, Iran has responded with retaliatory attacks on Israel, as well as targets in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.



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