Two data centres operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” by drones, the company said, while a separate facility in Bahrain was taken offline after sustaining damage from an unmanned aerial vehicle attack.
AWS warned that instability in the Middle East was likely to continue, making operations “unpredictable”.
In a statement, the company said the attacks had caused structural damage and disrupted electricity supply to its infrastructure. “These attacks have caused structural damage, have disrupted power supply to our infrastructure and in some cases required fire suppression activities that led to additional water damage,” Amazon said.
Among the services affected were the company’s widely used Amazon EC2 virtual server capacity service, Amazon S3 storage service and Amazon DynamoDB database service. AWS said several applications experienced “increased error rates and degraded availability” as a result of the incident.
The company said it was working to restore services in the region as quickly as possible but expected recovery efforts to be prolonged “given the nature of the physical damage”.
