LONDON – Recent Iranian drone strikes have inflicted damage on three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the Middle East, underscoring both the swift expansion of data centers in the area and their susceptibility to regional conflicts.
Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS, reported late Monday that two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates suffered direct hits, while another facility in Bahrain sustained damage when a drone landed nearby. These incidents highlight the precarious position such critical infrastructure occupies amid geopolitical tensions.
In an update on its online dashboard, AWS described the extent of the damage, stating, “The strikes have led to structural damage and disrupted power supply to our infrastructure. In certain cases, fire suppression efforts added further water damage.”
By late Tuesday, AWS reported that recovery operations at the affected UAE data centers were advancing. Despite the attacks, which contrast with past disruptions that involved software issues causing widespread global outages, these incidents have resulted in only localized and limited disruptions.
Amazon Web Services plays a pivotal role in the digital world, providing essential cloud computing infrastructure that supports numerous government departments, universities, and businesses worldwide. The recent strikes serve as a stark reminder of the vulnerabilities that accompany the rapid growth of technology infrastructure in volatile regions.
Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world’s most-used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.
The company advised customers using servers in the Middle East to migrate to other regions, and direct online traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain.
“Amazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data center would be relatively unimportant to its operations,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
Other data centers in the same zone can take over, and most of the time this happens seamlessly every day to balance workloads, he said.
“That said, the loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn’t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”
Amazon doesn’t typically disclose the exact number of data centers it operates around the world.
It says only that its data centers are clustered in 39 geographic regions, with three such regions in the Middle East, covering the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel.
Each AWS region is split up into at least three data center availability zones, with each zone isolated and physically separated “by a meaningful distance,” although they are all within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of each other and connected by “ultra-low-latency networks” that reduce the time lag for data transmission.
AWS says its data centers have redundant water, power, telecom, and internet connections “so we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency.”
They also have physical security, but those measures, including security guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, are designed to keep out intruders rather than defend against missile attacks.
Chapple said the attacks are a reminder that cloud computing isn’t “magical” and “still requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios.”
Data centers run by AWS and other operators are massive facilities that are hard to hide, he added.
“Organizations using services from any cloud provider in the Middle East should immediately take steps to shift their computing to other regions,” Chapple said.
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