Wednesday, March 4, 2026
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LONDON — The fast expansion of data centers in the Middle East and the industry's susceptibility to conflict are highlighted by the damage caused by Iranian drone strikes to three Amazon Web Services facilities in the region.
After a drone landed close by, Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing subsidiary, reported late Monday that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were "directly struck" and another site in Bahrain was also affected.
AWS stated in an update on its online dashboard that "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."
By the end of Tuesday, it reported that the UAE data centers were making headway in their recovery operations.
These physical damage attacks seem to have caused relatively localized and limited disruption, in contrast to earlier software-related AWS failures that caused extensive worldwide outages.
Many of the most popular online services in the world are hosted by Amazon Web Services, which also offers cloud computing infrastructure behind the scenes to numerous government agencies, academic institutions, and commercial enterprises.
The business suggested that clients with Middle Eastern servers move to other areas and divert their internet traffic from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
According to Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, "Amazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data center would be relatively unimportant to its operations."
In order to balance workloads, other data centers in the same zone can take over, and this usually happens smoothly every day, he said.
"That being said, if several data centers within an availability zone are lost, there may be insufficient capacity left to manage all the work, which could lead to major problems."
The precise number of data centers that Amazon operates worldwide is usually not disclosed.
It simply states that its data centers are spread over 39 geographical regions, three of which are in the Middle East and include Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
At least three data center availability zones are divided into each AWS region; these zones are physically and geographically isolated from one another "by a meaningful distance," but they are all within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of one another and are linked by "ultra-low-latency networks" that minimize the latency for data transmission.
Water, power, telecom, and internet connections are redundant in AWS's data centers "so we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency."
While they do have physical security, such as security guards, fences, video monitoring, and alarm systems, these are not meant to ward off missile assaults, but rather to keep out intruders.
The attacks, according to Chapple, serve as a reminder that cloud computing is not "magical" and "still requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios."
He stated that data centers operated by AWS and other operators are large, difficult-to-hide establishments.
Chapple advised companies who use services from any Middle Eastern cloud provider to move their computing to other areas right once.
