Iranian Drone Strikes Damage Three AWS Data Centres, Months Needed for Repairs
Iranian drones struck three AWS data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, causing structural and water damage to servers and power systems, with repairs expected to span several months. Amazon has paused billing for affected customers and urged them to migrate workloads to other regions to maintain operations.
1. Strike Details
In early May, Iranian drones targeted three AWS data centres—two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain—inflicting structural damage, disabling power systems and triggering fire suppression which led to water damage in server racks.
2. Impact on AWS Services
The attacks disrupted core AWS offerings including computing, storage and database services, forcing regional retailers, logistics platforms and digital marketplaces to reroute or pause operations and experience outages and performance degradation.
3. Repair Timeline and Customer Relief
Amazon anticipates multi-month repair timelines and has suspended billing for affected clients while advising immediate migration of critical workloads to intact regions; this incident highlights vulnerabilities of physical cloud infrastructure in conflict zones.