Drone Strikes Damage AWS UAE, Bahrain Data Centers Causing Service Outages
Drone strikes in early March damaged infrastructure in AWS’s UAE ME CENTRAL 1 region, knocking out two of three Availability Zones and causing water damage during fire suppression. A facility in Bahrain’s ME SOUTH 1 region was also hit, leading to elevated error rates and reduced performance for EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda and RDS.
1. Impact on Data Centers
Drone strikes struck two of three Availability Zones in the ME CENTRAL 1 region in the UAE and impacted at least one facility in Bahrain’s ME SOUTH 1 region. Structural damage from explosions and nearby landings compromised power and network connectivity to critical infrastructure.
2. Service Disruptions and Performance
Customers in both regions have seen elevated error rates and slowed performance for Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda and Amazon RDS. The remaining zone in ME CENTRAL 1 remains online but is experiencing ripple effects due to system dependencies.
3. Mitigation and Recovery Efforts
Fire suppression efforts caused water damage to some equipment, further complicating repairs. AWS has advised clients to back up data and consider shifting workloads to other regions while teams work on restoring full capacity.