Amazon AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have been damaged by drone strikes, forcing parts of the company’s cloud services offline.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud arm of Amazon, said two of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates were directly hit. A third site in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike.
The incidents happened early Sunday.
At first, AWS said “objects” struck a UAE data center, causing “sparks and fire.” It also reported power and connectivity issues in Bahrain.
Later, the company confirmed the outages were caused by drone strikes linked to the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East.”
“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,” AWS said.
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“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”
AWS said some of its core services, including EC2, S3 and DynamoDB, recorded “elevated error rates and degraded availability.”
The company said it is working to restore services but warned recovery may take time “given the nature of the physical damage involved.”
It also advised customers in the region to back up their data and “potentially migrate workloads” to other AWS regions as instability in the Middle East remains “unpredictable.”