In the early hours of Tuesday morning, London time, AWS confirmed that two of its locations suffered direct drone strikes, in what appears to be the first time a hyperscaler data centre has suffered kinetic attack.
AWS confirmed two of its data centre locations in the UAE were directly hit by drone strikes, with another location in Bahrain taken offline without being hit directly.
AWS had previously reported two availability zones in its ME-CENTRAL-1 region in the UAE were down after infrastructure had been struck by "objects." The hyperscaler also said an availability zone in its ME-SOUTH-1 region in Bahrain had been taken offline on Monday.
The Gulf states have suffered retaliatory drone and missile attacks by Iran after US-Israeli strikes killed Iran's leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday.
AWS war-time communications
"In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure," AWS said in a status update nearly 36 hours after it first reported disruption in the region.
"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."
Amazon has declined to answer questions or provide information outside of the status system.
Financial institutions that rely on AWS have been impacted by the outage, an unnamed source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Monday. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank reported its digital platform and mobile app were unavailable because of regional IT disruption – without directly referencing AWS.
Wartime bootstrapping
AWS provided some detail of its efforts to bring its "impaired" ME-CENTRAL-1 region back to full operation, starting with foundational services.
