Amazon data centres hit by drones

Amazon Web Services said on March 2 that two of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates were directly struck by drones and a facility in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike, disrupting cloud services across the region. AWS said the damage included structural hits, power disruption and water damage from fire suppression, and warned recovery would be “prolonged.” Reuters reported at the time that the outage hit financial institutions using AWS in the region and marked the first known disruption of a major U.S. tech company’s data centre by military action. ### What exactly did Amazon say was hit? AWS said in a status update that “two of our facilities were directly struck” in the UAE, while a drone strike near one Bahrain facility caused physical impact to infrastructure. The company said the strikes damaged buildings, interrupted power delivery and forced fire suppression responses that added water damage. (zawya.com) DatacenterDynamics reported that two of the company’s three availability zones in its ME-CENTRAL-1 region remained significantly impaired after the attack, while one zone continued operating. AWS said customers saw elevated error rates and degraded availability across services including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS, CloudWatch and the management console. (zawya.com) ### Which services and customers were affected? Reuters reported on March 2 that financial institutions using AWS were affected, citing a person with direct knowledge of the situation. DatacenterDynamics said the disruption also affected Careem, Alaan, Hubpay, ADCB, Emirates NBD and Snowflake. (datacenterdynamics.com) CNBC reported on May 24 that attacks on data centres in the Middle East and persistently high energy prices have changed the calculations for operators weighing projects in the region. That report said some planned data-centre decisions tied to AI demand had paused as companies reassessed security and operating costs. ### Why did this become bigger than a single outage? (zawya.com) Reuters said the strike raised questions about Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the Gulf, where U.S. technology companies have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for AI computing. Reuters also reported that Microsoft said in November it planned to bring its total UAE investment to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and use Nvidia chips in its local data centres. (cnbc.com) The Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a February analysis that, in the “compute era,” regional actors could target “data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints.” That framing was later cited by Reuters in its reporting on the AWS strikes. ### Why are energy and security now being discussed together? (zawya.com) CNBC reported on May 24 that high energy prices and attacks on digital infrastructure are now shaping where operators place data centres in the Gulf. Analysts cited by CNBC said the economics of AI infrastructure depend not just on chips and land, but on reliable power and the ability to protect facilities during regional conflict. (csis.org) CSIS said compute infrastructure depends on several chokepoints, including energy and data centres, rather than one single capture point. That has made physical resilience, power access and network routing part of the same planning problem for operators expanding AI capacity. ### What happens next for Amazon and the Gulf buildout? AWS said in March that it was working with local authorities and prioritising employee safety while restoring service, but expected the process to take time because of the physical damage. (cnbc.com) The company also recommended that customers back up data and consider migrating workloads to alternate AWS regions while attacks continued. (csis.org) Microsoft, Google and Oracle were identified by Reuters as companies with facilities in the UAE that were being drawn into the same risk discussion after the strikes. The next concrete markers are AWS recovery updates, any changes to customer migration guidance, and whether Gulf data-centre projects move ahead on their existing timelines. (zawya.com) (datacenterdynamics.com)