In a status page, Amazon’s AWS Health said drone strikes damaged three AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain on Monday, causing an outage that continues to affect dozens of cloud services.
KEY FACTS
- Incident Drone strikes struck AWS facilities
- Regions affected AWS Middle East UAE (ME-CENTRAL-1) and Bahrain (ME-SOUTH-1)
- Damage Structural damage, power disruptions and water damage from fire suppression
- Customer guidance Back up data and migrate workloads to unaffected regions
Three availability zones remain impaired. The UAE zones mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 are listed as significantly impaired. The Bahrain zone mes1-az2 is affected by a localized power issue.
The strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery and in some cases required fire suppression that resulted in water damage.
Restoration work includes repairing physical infrastructure and pursuing multiple software based recovery paths that do not require the underlying facilities to be fully brought back online.
Customers should back up data, migrate workloads to unaffected regions and exercise disaster recovery plans. Alternate regions in the United States, Europe or Asia Pacific are options depending on latency and data residency needs.
WHY IT MATTERS
Physical attacks on cloud facilities can produce prolonged service disruptions and force customers to move critical workloads across regions. The incident highlights the operational risk to cloud infrastructure amid regional conflict.