AWS sites in Bahrain and the UAE are offline after drone strikes, with Tehran’s media tying it to US military support.
Amazon’s Bahrain data centre was targeted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard because of the company’s support for the US military, Iranian state media said.
Iran’s Fars News Agency claimed on Telegram the attack in Bahrain was launched “to identify the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities,”
Amazon Web Services, cloud computing unit, said on one of its facilities in Bahrain was damaged due to a nearby drone strike on Sunday. Two data centres in the United Arab Emirates were damaged after they were “directly struck” by drones.
All the affected facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard.
The incidents followed joint US-Israel strikes on Iran over the weekend, with Iran retaliating against Israeli and US bases across the Gulf. That makes AWS’s regional footprint look less like resilience and more like a set of targets.
Amazon said the data centres suffered structural damage, power disruptions, and some water damage after firefighters dealt with sparks and a fire. Some popular AWS applications saw “elevated error rates and degraded availability” after the incident.
AWS told customers to back up their data, consider moving workloads to other regions and steer traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.
AWS launched its Bahrain region in 2019 and hosts significant government workloads there, which is a fun detail when state media starts talking about “military and intelligence activities”. Amazon runs a corporate office in Bahrain for AWS staff, because someone has to keep the lights on when the lights do not stay on.
Earlier this week, Amazon told corporate staff in the Middle East to work remotely and “follow local government guidelines” as the situation worsened. That is the sort of email nobody wants in their inbox when they are just trying to ship packets.
