Amazon says drones hit 3 of its Middle East data centers amid Iran conflict

Amazon said drones struck three of its Middle East data centers, causing outages related to the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” 

Drones directly struck two Amazon Web Services facilities in the United Arab Emirates, and a drone strike near an Amazon data center in Bahrain also damaged that facility, the company said in a post on Monday on AWS’s health dashboard.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said. 

Operations in the Middle East remain “significantly impaired,” AWS said, noting that “customers are experiencing elevated error rates and degraded availability for services.”

Amazon said it is working to restore services and repair physical damage to its facilities, while cautioning that the “broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable.”

The company encouraged its customers in the Middle East to back up data and consider migrating workloads to servers in other regions. 

Shares of Amazon declined $3.40, or 1.6%, to $204.99 in early trading.