SEATTLE, Washington: Amazon's cloud computing division said this week that drone strikes in the Middle East conflict damaged some of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, disrupting services and potentially prolonging recovery efforts.
The strikes came after Iran launched drones and missiles at Gulf States in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli attacks that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28.
The damage marks the first time a major U.S. technology company's data center has been disrupted by military action, raising questions about the risks facing Big Tech's rapid expansion in the region.
"In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impact to our infrastructure," 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.
AWS had earlier said "objects" triggered a fire on March 1 that forced authorities to cut power to a cluster of its UAE data centers, with restoration expected to take at least a day.
A person with direct knowledge of the situation said financial institutions relying on AWS services were among those affected by the outage. The individual requested 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.
Regional AI ambitions face new risks.
U.S. technology companies have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence infrastructure, with support for services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to raise its total investment in the UAE to US$15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips in its data centers there.
"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," the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, which also operate facilities in the UAE, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The AWS outage disrupted a dozen core cloud services. The company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to unaffected AWS regions.
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, though it did not directly link the outage to AWS.
