Drone strike hits AWS Bahrain data centre, jolts global cloud
Amazon said drone activity disrupted its AWS Bahrain region amid the Middle East conflict, marking the second war-related hit in a month.
- An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre region in Bahrain experienced a disruption linked to drone activity in the area.
- It is unconfirmed if the facility was directly hit by a drone or if the disruption was caused by nearby strikes.
- Amazon is advising customers with workloads in the affected region to migrate them to other AWS locations.
- This is the second time in a month that AWS operations in Bahrain have been affected by drone activity related to the conflict in the Middle East.
Amazon said on Monday (March 23) that its Amazon Web Services region in Bahrain had been disrupted amid the conflict in the Middle East, the second time in a month that the war has affected the company’s operations.
An Amazon spokesperson said the disruption was linked to drone activity in the area in response to a Reuters enquiry.
Reuters was first to report the incident.
By Monday night, AWS had still not updated its status page to show the impact.
Amazon did not immediately say whether its Bahrain facility had been directly hit by a drone or whether the disruption had resulted from strikes nearby.
The company said it was helping customers move to alternative AWS regions while recovery work continued, but gave no further details on the extent of the damage or how long the disruption was expected to last.
“As this situation evolves and, as we have advised before, we request those with workloads in the affected regions continue to migrate to other locations,” Amazon said in a statement on Monday night.
AWS is Amazon’s cloud computing division and is essential to the running of many major websites and government operations.
It is also the company’s main source of profit.
The latest incident is the second time since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran that drone activity has affected AWS’s Bahrain region.
Earlier this month, AWS said facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates had lost power, and that it was working to restore services, including by shifting computing workloads to other regions.
Reuters reported earlier in March that the strike on the UAE facility was the first known case in which military action had disrupted a data centre operated by a major US technology company.
Amazon said at the time that recovery was expected to be prolonged because of structural damage.
Earlier this month, AWS said on its status page that the strikes had caused structural damage, interrupted power delivery to its infrastructure and, in some cases, triggered fire suppression activity that led to further water damage.
Amazon also said at the time that the Bahrain region had been affected by a drone strike near one of its facilities.
Reuters
