After drone attack: AWS warns Middle East customers of long downtime
A drone attack in March crippled two AWS regions. It could take a long time for operations to return to normal.
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The Iran war continues to affect the operations of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates: Amazon has now informed its customers that it will take several more months for services to run normally again. Drone attacks on two AWS data centers in early March had caused devastating damage. The so-called AWS region "ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE)" is affected.
After two months, Amazon has now publicly informed on a status page about the current situation. Due to the damage "as a result of the conflict in the Middle East", the cloud infrastructure is currently unable to reliably support customer applications. "While some workloads continue to function normally, we strongly recommend customers migrate all accessible resources to other Regions and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups as soon as possible." While AWS restores operations in the region, billing for customers is suspended. The work is expected to take several more months.
Two different data centers were directly hit by drones in the United Arab Emirates, and another facility in Bahrain was affected by a nearby drone strike. Amazon spoke at the time of "structural damage" from the impacts. Consequently, the power supply was restricted at the time. Fighting fires had also caused water damage in some cases.
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The Iran war is also affecting Amazon's business elsewhere. Online retailers selling their goods via the company's websites now face higher costs. In the US and Canada, Amazon has been charging a 3.5 percent surcharge on its third-party seller fees for packaging and delivery of goods (Fulfilled by Amazon, FBA) since April 17. The reason is the increased fuel prices due to the Iran war. In the European Union, Amazon fulfillment fees are significantly more moderate in many member states due to reduced fuel taxes.
(nen)
