Drone attacks damage AWS data centres in UAE and take Bahrain facility offline

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Amazon Web Services said two of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates were directly hit by drones, while a separate facility in Bahrain was taken offline after sustaining damage from an unmanned aerial vehicle attack.

Damage and operational impact

AWS said the attacks caused structural damage and disrupted electricity supply to its infrastructure. The company said some incidents required fire suppression activities that led to additional water damage.

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Services affected

AWS said the incident affected services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. Several applications experienced increased error rates and degraded availability, the company said.

Recovery efforts and outlook

AWS 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. The company warned that instability in the Middle East was likely to continue, making operations unpredictable.

How could the disruptions affect your use of AWS services in the region?