The ongoing Iran-Israel-US conflict has escalated with multiple drone strikes from Iran severely damaging Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers across the Middle East. The attacks, confirmed by Amazon late Monday, directly hit two facilities in the United Arab Emirates and damaged a third in Bahrain.
This move has impacted thousands of businesses as they are facing long hours of outages. Many businesses are trying to move their data to Western servers. The event raises urgent questions about the physical safety of the global internet infrastructure.
On Sunday morning, drones started firing at two AWS buildings in the UAE. Following this surprise attack, the local authorities cut the power and turned on fire suppression systems, which led to water damage and broken structures. In Bahrain, a drone landed near a facility and caused a severe infrastructure failure.
According to an AWS public update: “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. We expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved.”
Amazon usually builds its systems to survive a single failure; however, these strikes hit two zones at the exact same time, crippling the entire network across the UAE. It caused a ‘cascading effect’ on storage and computing power. Local banks and government offices are now stuck in a digital deadlock.
Though the damage to these data centers is significant, the deeper crisis the UAE and Bahrain are facing is about data sovereignty laws. Over the last 3 years, Middle Eastern governments framed new rules that require companies to store sensitive data within the borders. These companies are now trapped as they cannot legally move their data to Europe or the US since their local digital vaults are physically burning.
As reported by WFAA, Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame, told the Associated Press: “The loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn't enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.”
Customers are also feeling the heat of the attacks as their bank accounts are temporarily frozen. Hospitals are unable to access healthcare records, while small businesses do not have budgets to implement backup plans. This is a critical situation for both the residents and immigrants in the region.