AWS outage in the Middle East: Data center "hit by objects"

Following the attacks on Iran, the Islamic Republic is firing missiles at Gulf states. AWS is now experiencing an outage that is likely related.

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at 9:13 am CET

2 min. read

By

Martin Holland

Amazon's cloud service AWS has been experiencing an outage in the Middle East since Sunday after “objects hit a data center” in the United Arab Emirates, causing a fire. The US company announced this and has since provided updates in several short posts on the progress of work to resolve the issue. Meanwhile, it remains unclear what kind of object it was. Given the events of the weekend, it is plausible that it could have been a missile or drone from Iran. Since Israel and the US attacked the Islamic Republic on Saturday – killing, among others, head of state Ali Khamenei – Iran has been attacking targets throughout the region.

Duration of the outage still uncertain

According to AWS, the outage began on Sunday afternoon local time; initially, it was only stated that problems in the “ME-CENTRAL-1” region were being investigated. The US company later announced that it was a local problem in a single so-called “Availability Zone.” AWS defines this as “one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region.” The outage therefore had effects beyond the local area. Hours later, the cause was announced, along with the prediction that the issue could persist for hours. Users can now avoid the data center, but it is unclear when it will be operational again. Numerous services are still affected.

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Israel and the US began carrying out airstrikes on Iran on Saturday morning. At the very beginning, several high-ranking representatives of the Islamic Republic were killed, most notably Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had dictatorially ruled the country for 37 years. Tehran responded with counterattacks on Israel and on Gulf states where the US maintains bases. Although people were killed in these attacks, the states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) only repelled Iran's attacks but did not strike back. Together with the US, several Arab states condemned the counterattacks as a dangerous escalation.