AWS Outage Follows UAE Data Center Damage by 'Objects'

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On Monday, Amazon’s cloud infrastructure in the Middle East encountered power and connectivity problems after unknown “objects” impacted its data center in the UAE. The incident caused a fire on Sunday, prompting authorities to shut down power to two Amazon data center clusters in the UAE. Restoring services is expected to take several hours, based on updates from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The localized power outages disrupted AWS services not only in the UAE but also in nearby Bahrain. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank reported that its systems and mobile app were offline due to a regional IT outage, though it didn’t directly connect the issue to the AWS disruption.

The specific nature of the “objects” remains unclear. The incident coincided with Iran launching a drone and missile attack against Gulf countries in retaliation for recent strikes by the US and Israel that targeted Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. If confirmed, an attack on the UAE AWS data center would be the first time a major US tech company’s facility has gone offline due to military activity, raising concerns about regional tensions and the rapid expansion of Big Tech in the Middle East.

U.S. technology giants have made moves to establish the UAE as a hub for artificial intelligence development, powering services like ChatGPT. Microsoft announced plans in November to increase its investment in the UAE to $15 billion by 2029, including the use of Nvidia chips in its local data centers.

A report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies last week warned that in modern conflicts, adversaries such as Iran and its proxies might target not just energy infrastructure but also data centers, fiber optic lines, and other digital assets that support compute operations.

Responses from other major cloud providers operating in the UAE, like Google and Oracle, were not immediately available. AWS indicated that full recovery for both the UAE and Bahrain regions could take many hours. During the outage, over a dozen core cloud services were affected, and customers were advised to back up essential data and shift operations to unaffected AWS regions.