Key Points:
- Iran attacked an Amazon data center in Bahrain with a drone strike.
- Two more Amazon facilities in the UAE also took direct drone hits.
- Iranian state media claims Amazon supports US military intelligence.
- The attacks caused structural damage, power outages, and data errors.
Iran deliberately targeted Amazon’s cloud computing facilities in the Middle East. State media in Iran confirmed on Wednesday that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the attacks. They accused the American tech giant of supporting the United States military and intelligence operations.
The violence started over the weekend following a joint US and Israeli strike against Iran. In retaliation, Iranian forces sent drones to hit various targets across the Gulf region. Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed that one of its data centers in Bahrain suffered damage from a nearby explosion on Sunday. Two other facilities located in the United Arab Emirates took direct hits from the drones.
According to the official AWS health dashboard, all three of these major data centers remain completely offline. The attacks caused serious structural problems for the buildings. Furthermore, when local firefighters arrived to put out the resulting blazes, the water caused even more damage to the sensitive computer servers inside.
This massive hardware failure immediately rippled across the internet. Many popular applications that rely on AWS reported high error rates and struggled to stay online. To prevent data loss, Amazon quickly advised its cloud customers to back up their files. The company also suggested that businesses move their digital workloads to other regions and reroute their internet traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.
Amazon opened its Bahrain data region back in 2019. Since then, it has grown to host significant amounts of data for local governments. The company also runs a large corporate office in the country. Given the rapidly escalating danger, Amazon told all its corporate staff in the Middle East to stay home, work remotely, and follow local safety guidelines until the situation cools down.
