On 15 September, AWS confirmed that the damage in Bahrain was across several availability zones. In the UAE, AWS was unable to restore access to resources and data which were held exclusively in one availability zone named mec1-az2.
However, the company is continuing its work on recovering resources across its affected facilities the UAE and two other impacted zones.
In a status update, AWS said: “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.” The company also confirmed that it will work with its customers in Bahrain to migrate their operations to other regions, as well supporting customers in the UAE.
The sites were damaged earlier this year as part of the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran. In April, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran announced plans to target major US technology companies with presence in the Middle East.
In March, Amazon reported that operations at the Bahrain data centre were disrupted – at the same time, done activity was reported in the area. The company did not confirm that the facility was hit, however Amazon did state that it was working to restore normal service to the data centre.
The IRGC then claimed responsibility for a cruise missile strike on the data centre in July, wherein the site was “destroyed”. At the time, AWS’ Health Dashboard reported that service in Bahrain was unavailable, and that service in the Middle East were disrupted.
The disruption notice read: “The Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications.”
“We strongly recommend customers migrate all accessible resources to other Regions and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups as soon as possible.”
Amazon is not the only technology company to be targeted during the war. The IRGC named Meta, Nvidia, Tesla, HP, Intel, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Google, others. Another named target, Oracle, was impacted when its data centre in Dubai was hit.
The attacks have continued to raise concerns for the resilience of cloud and AI infrastructure internationally, especially in war-impacted regions. As AI projects continue to advance rapidly in the Middle East, attacks have already prompted the UAE to revise its plan for a 5GW campus of AI data centres.
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