TWO AWS data centres in the United Arab Emirates were described as being “directly struck” and another facility in Bahrain was damaged after a drone landed nearby, highlighting the industry’s vulnerability to physical disasters, according to Associated Press. AWS said the strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases necessitated fire suppression that led to additional water damage, with recovery efforts at the UAE sites making progress by late Tuesday.
The company advised customers using Middle East servers to migrate to other regions and to direct online traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain. Industry observers noted that such attacks emphasise how cloud services, while widely used, still rely on physical facilities on the ground.
SecurityWeek’s report quotes Mike Chapple of the University of Notre Dame as saying that the loss of multiple data centres within an availability zone could create serious capacity issues, though AWS data centres are designed with redundancy and regional failover in mind.