LONDON (AP) — Iranian drone strikes have damaged three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East, underscoring the rapid growth of data centers in the region and the industry’s vulnerability to conflict.
Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing unit, said late Monday that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were “directly hit” after a drone landed nearby, and another in Bahrain was also damaged.
“These attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required firefighting activities, resulting in additional water damage,” AWS said in an update to its online dashboard.
The company said recovery efforts at its UAE data centers were making progress as of Tuesday evening.
Unlike previous AWS outages involving software that resulted in widespread outages around the world, these attacks involving physical damage appear to have caused only localized and limited outages.
Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world’s most commonly used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure for many governments, universities, and businesses.
The company advised customers using servers in the Middle East to move to other regions and direct online traffic away from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“Amazon typically configures its services so that the loss of a single data center is relatively less critical to its operations,” said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
Other data centers in the same area can take over, he said, and most of the time this happens seamlessly on a daily basis to balance workloads.
“That said, the loss of multiple data centers within an Availability Zone could cause serious problems, as things could get to the point where there simply isn’t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”
Amazon typically doesn’t reveal the exact number of data centers it operates around the world.
It simply said that its data centers are clustered in 39 geographical regions, three of which are in the Middle East, covering the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel.
Each AWS region is divided into at least three data center availability zones, each of which is isolated and physically separated by “a meaningful distance,” although they are all within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of each other and connected by an “ultra-low latency network,” which reduces the time delay of data transfer.
AWS said its data centers have redundant water, power, telecommunications and internet connections “so we can maintain continuous operations in the event of an emergency”.
They also have physical security measures, but these, including guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, are designed to deter intruders, not protect against missile attacks.
Chappell said the attacks were a reminder that cloud computing is not “magical” and “still requires physical infrastructure on the ground, which is vulnerable to a variety of disaster scenarios.”
Data centers run by AWS and other operators are large facilities that are difficult to hide, he added.
“Organizations using the services of any cloud provider in the Middle East should take immediate steps to move their computing to other regions,” Chapple said.
