Main points
- Amazon Web Services is suffering from serious technical issues due to damage to a facility in the UAE due to an attack.
- The incident came amid a military escalation in the region, where Iran has carried out massive strikes on several countries, including the UAE, causing damage to critical infrastructure.
AWS cloud services under attack: data center fire causes widespread disruptions in the Middle East / Collage by Channel 24/Freepik
Cloud platform Amazon Web Services has faced serious technical problems due to physical damage to one of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates. As a result of “unidentified objects” entering the territory of the data center, a fire broke out, which led to a power outage and disruption of communications. The incident occurred against the backdrop of a large-scale escalation of the military conflict in the region.
What consequences did the attack cause?
Tech giant Amazon has officially confirmed that its services were disrupted after one of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates was hit by unknown objects. According to the company, the incident occurred at approximately 4:30 p.m. local time on Sunday, March 1. Everything quickly escalated into a power outage and a fire, writes Reuters.
This event directly affected one of Amazon's so-called Availability Zones, known by the technical identifier mec1-az2. In Amazon's structure, such zones consist of one or more physically separate data centers that are interconnected but have independent power and cooling.
The company operates 123 such zones in 39 regions around the world. Despite the isolation of the facilities, the scale of the damage forced AWS to redirect network traffic to other nodes to minimize disruption to users.
The company's key clients in this region include such large institutions as Dubai Islamic Bank and the investment group Al Ghurair Investment LLC.
The situation worsened the next day, Monday. Representatives of the cloud division reported local power supply problems in another availability zone in the UAE, as well as similar difficulties in Bahrain.
While some services have begun to gradually resume operations, the company urged its customers to temporarily rely on resources in other global regions, as a full return to stable operation will require significant time.
What is happening in the UAE?
The data center incident occurred on the same day that the United Arab Emirates came under heavy fire, an attack Iran responded to military strikes by the United States and Israel that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior officials.
The waves of missile and drone launches were aimed not only at the UAE, but also at other countries in the region where American military bases are located, including Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, writes The Straits Times.
According to available information, the Iranian strikes targeted critical infrastructure, including airports and seaports, as well as residential areas throughout the Gulf. Representatives of Amazon Web Services did not give a direct answer to journalists' questions about whether the fire in their data center was directly related to these hostilities. In its official reports, the company limited itself to the formulation of the impact of third-party objects on the territory of the complex.
Specialists continue to investigate the causes of the power and communication outage, trying to restore network functionality amid the general destabilization of the situation in the Persian Gulf.