UPDATE (3/3): Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that recent drone strikes by Iran took down three of its facilities 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,” Amazon posted at 4:19 p.m. PST on Monday.
The situation at the impacted facilities hasn’t improved since the update, and Amazon is unsure when the infrastructure will be restored. The strikes caused structural damage, knocked out power, and sparked fire, Amazon said, adding that efforts to control the fire caused additional water damage at the data centers.
The company is currently prioritizing employee safety and has asked its customers to route their workloads to AWS data centers in the US, Europe, or Asia Pacific.
AWS’s Health Status page hasn’t reported any casualties at the data centers so far. The war against Iran, however, could go on for four to five weeks, President Donald Trump said.
Original Story (3/2):
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that some of its services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are experiencing disruptions after unidentified objects hit a data center in the Middle East.
The incident set off a fire at the facility and knocked out its power supply. The company is unsure when the power will be restored and is currently routing customer requests to a different data center.
“At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire,” AWS posted at 9:41 p.m. PST on Sunday. “The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely.”
As of late Sunday, the status hasn’t improved. “We expect recovery is multiple hours away,” AWS said in its latest update at 10:46 p.m. PST.
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AWS hasn’t linked the “objects” to retaliatory strikes carried out across the Middle East by Iran over the weekend. When Reuters asked AWS about it, the company neither confirmed nor denied it. The company’s Service Health page indicates that a data center in Bahrain is also facing issues due to power outages.
A host of popular tech companies rely on AWS cloud infrastructure to provide services. A major outage in November took down Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Lyft, Reddit, Roku, Signal, Slack, Snapchat, Venmo, and others.
As of the time this story was published, DownDetector didn’t show any disruptions to Amazon, AWS, or any other dependent services for people in the US.
(Disclosure: Downdetector owner Ookla is owned by PCMag parent company Ziff Davis.)
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Jibin is a tech news writer based out of Ahmedabad, India. Previously, he served as the editor of iGeeksBlog and is a self-proclaimed tech enthusiast who loves breaking down complex information for a broader audience.
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