Amazon issued statement after its services disrupted in Middle East following drone strikes on its data centers.
According to CNBC, Amazon Web Services late Monday, March 3, said that two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, taking the facilities offline.
The incident occurred Sunday morning, with the company posting to its AWS health dashboard at the time that “objects” hit data centers in the UAE, causing “sparks and fire.” AWS also said it was investigating power and connectivity issues at a site in Bahrain.
The company’s latest update at 7:19 pm EST acknowledged the outages were caused by drone strikes tied to the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East.”
AWS said, “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. 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.”
The company’s popular EC2 service, which provides virtual server capacity, S3 storage service and its DynamoDB database service were among several applications experiencing “elevated error rates and degraded availability” due to the incident.
AWS said it’s working to quickly restore service in the area, but it expects recovery to be prolonged “given the nature of the physical damage involved.”
AWS warned that instability is likely to continue in the Middle East, making operations “unpredictable.”
