Amazon: Drone strikes damaged AWS data centers in Middle East

Source: Bleeping Computer

Incident Overview

Amazon has confirmed that three Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, causing an extensive outage that continues to affect dozens of cloud computing services. While the company did not provide further details, the attacks are likely part of Iran’s response to U.S. and Israeli strikes in the Middle East over the weekend.

Impact on AWS Regions

The drone strikes disrupted:

• AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME‑CENTRAL‑1)
• AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME‑SOUTH‑1)

According to a status page update on Monday (4:19 PM PST), the physical impacts were as follows:

“Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure.”

The strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases required fire‑suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.

• UAE: Three availability zones (mec1‑az2 and mec1‑az3) remain significantly impaired.
• Bahrain: One availability zone (mes1‑az2) is still affected by a localized power issue.

Recovery Efforts

Amazon is:

• Restoring physical infrastructure.
• Working on multiple software‑based recovery paths that do not require the underlying facilities to be fully operational.
• Prioritizing the restoration of services and tools that enable customers to back up and migrate data and applications out of the impacted regions.

Recommendations for Customers

Amazon advises affected customers to:

• Exercise disaster‑recovery plans.
• Recover from remote backups stored in other regions.
• Update applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions.
• Consider migrating workloads to AWS regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, depending on latency and data‑residency requirements.

Related Security Advisory

On Monday, the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned British organizations of a heightened risk of Iranian cyber‑attacks amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. More information can be found in the NCSC advisory.