Amazon says drones damaged three facilities in UAE and Bahrain
Amazon’s cloud computing business says drones have hit three of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain following US and Israeli strikes against Iran at the weekend.
The incidents occurred on Sunday morning, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) saying at the time that ”objects” had hit a data centre in the UAE, creating ”sparks and fire”. Also on Sunday, AWS said it was investigating power and connectivity issues at a facility in Bahrain.
On Monday, the company confirmed that drone strikes had caused the outages.
The incidents highlight the vulnerability of key technology infrastructure, such as data centres, during military conflicts.
AWS said two UAE facilities were hit directly, ”while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure.”
The company said the drones caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to infrastructure, ”and in some cases, required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”
The firm added that it is working quickly to restore services to the affected areas, but that it could take time ”given the nature of the physical damage involved.”
It also recommended that customers using its services in the region back up their data and “potentially migrate workloads” to alternative AWS facilities elsewhere.
AWS also warned that the ongoing conflict means “the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable.”
President Donald Trump has signalled that the US strikes on Iran could last four to five weeks but could “go far longer”.
Iran has been launching waves of missiles and drones against US bases and allies around the region, including in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
‘Attractive targets’
AWS is the world’s largest cloud computing provider, with its infrastructure underpinning millions of websites and platforms for large companies.
It makes vital IT products like storage available to customers via data centres – huge halls of powerful computers – in locations across the world.
Vili Lehdonvirta, professor of technology policy at Aalto University, told BBC News it appeared to be the first time such cloud infrastructure had been “knocked down by military action”.
He said this was “not entirely unexpected” as with many governments and firms using a small number of large cloud providers, their data centres have become “attractive targets to anyone seeking to disrupt a country”.
“Also, given how US and allied military forces increasingly use cloud and commercial AI as part of their operations, it is not entirely unexpected that adversaries might start to target these infrastructures as ‘dual-use’ facilities,” he added.
Tech firms have, in recent years, spurred investment in the Middle East, inking huge deals to boost AI development in the region and to build infrastructure to support it.
Prof Lehdonvirta said the Gulf had also become a “hotspot” for Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent, though none have so far reported any similar service disruptions arising from conflict in the region.