The cloud and data center industry continues to remain in a precarious state amidst the ongoing war between the US and Iran. There are reports that the AWS region in Bahrain is experiencing disruption due to the drone activity in the region.
Reuters was the first to report on the matter, and said that this was the second time this month that operations were affected. However, the AWS Health Dashboard does not list the disruption as a fresh event. Instead it shows the last update made on March 3 and lists services as “disrupted”.
Readers would recall that earlier in March, as many as three Amazon digital infrastructure facilities in the Middle East reported being impacted by drone strikes. While two of these are in the UAE, one is in Bahrain. In a post on the AWS Health Dashboard, at 4:19 PM PST, on March 2, the company said, “Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure.”
Even now, the last update on this page is listed at Mar 03 8:40 AM PST, and says, “We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams.” It further advised customers, “We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions. Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions. For customers requiring guidance on alternate regions, we recommend considering AWS Regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, as appropriate for your latency and data residency requirements.”
“We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts,” a spokesperson said in a statement shared with CNBC. So far, there is no confirmation that the current disruption is the result of any new drone activity, or just an extension of the previous disruption.