Amazon Web Services has disclosed that its cloud services have been disrupted in the Middle East following drone strikes on its facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
According to AWS, the regions experienced physical damage. For example, two AWS facilities in the UAE were directly hit by drone strikes.
A third AWS facility was damaged in Bahrain following a drone strike on a nearby location.
AWS said the drone strikes resulted in damage to the structure of the facilities and disrupted the delivery of power. At times, the strikes triggered fire suppression systems and water damage.
The disruption has resulted in elevated error rates and availability for AWS customers who operate their workloads in the AWS Middle East (UAE) and AWS Middle East (Bahrain) regions.
Customers experienced intermittent difficulties accessing a range of AWS products to operate their websites, make payments and run their businesses.
In its service update messages, AWS said that the recovery process was likely to take a long time because repairs were necessary to the major building systems.
Amazon stated that it was cooperating with the local authorities and prioritising employee safety while engineers assessed the damage and commenced the process of repair.
The company also stated that it advised its customers who had systems hosted in the affected regions to activate their backups and disaster recovery plans.
Cloud architects often design their systems to have critical components hosted in multiple regions to reduce the risks associated with single points of failure.
However, in some instances, these components are hosted in one location for latency or cost reasons.
The disruptions serve as a reminder that the idea of cloud computing as a distant utility belies the physical presence that is nonetheless vulnerable to fires, floods and cyberattacks, along with the secondary effects of power and network unreliability.
For a region that includes many countries in the Gulf, any disruptions to business operations have the potential to cascade rapidly through electronic commerce, logistics, finance and government services that rely on constant connectivity.
AWS has not given any indication on how long it expects to take to fully restore its services except that it will be gradual with access and repairs in this unpredictable security situation.
