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Title: Amazon Cloud Unit's Data Centers In UAE, Bahrain Damaged In Drone
Strikes

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/03/0423...

sizzlinkitty shares a Reuters report detailing how drone strikes in the
Middle East conflict with Iran damaged AWS data centers in the UAE and
Bahrain, disrupting core cloud services and causing "prolonged" outages.
Following the initial report, where Reuters said "objects" had triggered a
fire at the data centers, the article was updated with additional
information: A strike on the UAE facility marks the first time a major U.S.
tech company's data center has been disrupted by military action. It raises
questions around Big Tech's pace of expansion in the region. "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 impact to our
infrastructure," Amazon's cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS) said in an
update on its status page. "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. "We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as
possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the
physical damage involved," it added. Financial institutions that use AWS
services have been affected by the outage, one person with direct knowledge
of the situation told Reuters, requesting anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the matter. "Even as we work to restore these facilities, the
ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment
in the Middle East remains unpredictable," AWS said. The AWS outage disrupted
a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up
critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions. Abu
Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due
to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage
to the AWS incident. "In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as
Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf
partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data
centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints,"
Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies
said last week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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