Iranian Drone Strikes Damage Amazon Data Centers

Three Amazon cloud data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged in Iranian drone strikes — the first-ever disruption of this kind as Big Tech firms grow their digital infrastructure presence in the Middle East. 

AWS said a pair of its data centers in the UAE suffered direct hits from Iranian drones Sunday, while one of its facilities in Bahrain sustained damage from a nearby strike. The data centers were hit amid a barrage of drones and missiles fired by Iran at the UAE, Bahrain and other Gulf states in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. 

The drone strikes caused physical damage, disrupted power delivery to the data centers and, in some cases, necessitated fire suppression measures that led to water damage, according to the company. 

Amazon’s cloud services in the Middle East have been severely impacted as a result. Full functionality still had not been restored as of Tuesday afternoon, with Amazon telling customers to expect a “prolonged” recovery period. 

With the regional conflict ongoing, the company has recommended that customers using their Middle East cloud regions should back up their data and, if possible, move it to other parts of the world. 

"Even as we work to ‌restore these ⁠facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable," company officials wrote on the AWS Health Dashboard. “We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions.”

This is the first time data centers operated by a major U.S. tech firm have been directly targeted militarily, Reuters reported.

The potential for data centers to be vulnerable targets in a conflict — and the potential consequences of such strikes — has been a growing concern among tech and military leaders. They warn that outages caused by physical strikes could cause widespread economic damage and potentially create operational disruptions for the military, intelligence services and other government bodies as well as defense supply chains.  

Sunday’s attacks occurred as major tech firms and data center developers are rapidly expanding their infrastructure footprints throughout the Gulf region.

In November, Microsoft announced plans for a $15B data center build-out in the UAE, while Google and Oracle also operate facilities in the country. Saudi Arabia is another major growth market, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aiming to have state-backed data center provider Humain eventually handle 6% of global artificial intelligence workloads.