Amazon confirms drone strikes in Middle East, advises customers to migrate to other regions

Datacentres in UAE and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes on Sunday

Amazon has confirmed that outages in two of its three AWS Middle East availability zones reported yesterday were caused by drone strikes in the conflict between the US and Israel and Iran.

Availability zones are clusters of datacentres with independent power supplies and connectivity located in the same geographical region. They are intended to provide resilience in case of a failure of a single zone, but this resilience is obviously limited in the event of a region-wide event.

In an update to its health status dashboard dated 3rd March 1:04 AM PST (9:04 GMT), Amazon says two UAE facilities were struck directly by drones while a datacentre in Bahrain was affected by a strike nearby.

The strikes on Sunday caused structural damage, power disruption and water damage from fire-suppression systems, with recovery depending on power restoration and safety clearance from local authorities. There have been knock-on effects on the one availability zone that was not damaged.

The company said it is “working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible,” adding that the extent of the damage and the ongoing conflict means this could take longer than the “several hours” mentioned in earlier updates.

According to Amazon, the S3 storage service in the region has improved, although it is still not fully functional, and AWS Management Console is now operational, although customers are experiencing errors.

Meanwhile other core services including DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch and RDS remain unavailable or “degraded”, and EC2 compute instance launches in the region are throttled.

Donald Trump has indicated that the conflict, which is spreading to other countries in the region, could last for “four to five weeks,” but could "go far longer than that".

Amazon, which operates AWS datacentres in 39 regions globally, advises organisations to relocate workloads away from the Middle East.

It urges customers to “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.”