Amazon announced on Wednesday that two of its cloud data centres in the region, located in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, sustained significant damage following an Iranian drone strike. The company confirmed that the impact was severe enough to prompt a full waiver of usage fees for affected customers for one month.
The strike occurred on the first day of last month. While Amazon disclosed the incident at the time, it has now clarified that the damage included structural impacts and disruptions to power supply across critical infrastructure, with Bahrain’s facility bearing the most substantial effects.
Structural Damage and System Disruptions
Amazon stated that fire suppression systems were activated during the incident, which led to additional water-related damage on top of the destruction caused by the attack itself. This compounded the overall impact on the affected infrastructure.
The disruption extended across several core Amazon Web Services products, including Elastic Compute Cloud, DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, S3, Kinesis, CloudWatch, and the AWS Management Console. These outages affected a wide range of users relying on Amazon’s cloud ecosystem across the region.
Customer Compensation and Data Concerns
Customers reported receiving communication from Amazon last week confirming the cancellation of all usage fees for March, citing the service disruptions caused by the incident.
However, the move has raised serious concerns. According to the website The Conversation, the unprecedented decision to waive fees may result in the loss of critical data related to compliance and security investigations. One of the affected components reportedly serves not only as a billing mechanism but also as a precise log of service usage, making its disruption particularly sensitive.
A First for Major US Cloud Infrastructure
The report highlighted that this incident marks the first large scale disruption of a major US based cloud service provider due to a direct attack. It underscores the vulnerability of data centres and the broader digital economy to emerging forms of warfare targeting infrastructure.
Amazon’s service status page also indicated that data centres in the Middle East continued to experience disruptions until the end of last month, confirming that the effects of the attack were ongoing rather than isolated.
Context Behind the Attack
Iranian news agency Fars reported that the targeting of Amazon’s data centres was linked to the company’s alleged support for US military and intelligence activities.
