![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/AP26062558987980-e1772575887899.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Damage to three Amazon<\/a> Web Services facilities in the Middle East from\u00a0Iranian drone strikes<\/a>\u00a0highlights the rapid growth of data centers in the region, as well as the industry\u2019s vulnerability to conflict.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, said late Monday that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were \u201cdirectly struck\u201d and another facility in Bahrain was also damaged after a drone landed nearby.<\/p>\n \u201cThese strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,\u201d AWS said in an update on its online dashboard.<\/p>\n It said by late Tuesday that recovery efforts at the UAE data centers were making progress.<\/p>\n Unlike\u00a0previous<\/a>\u00a0AWS\u00a0disruptions<\/a>\u00a0involving software that resulted in widespread global outages, these attacks involving physical damage appear to have resulted only in localized and limited disruption.<\/p>\n Amazon Web Services hosts many of the world\u2019s most-used online services, providing behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure to many government departments, universities and businesses.<\/p>\n The company advised customers using servers in the Middle East to migrate to other regions, and direct online traffic away from the UAE and Bahrain.<\/p>\n \u201cAmazon has generally configured its services so that the loss of a single data center would be relatively unimportant to its operations,\u201d said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame\u2019s Mendoza College of Business.<\/p>\n Other data centers in the same zone can take over, and most of the time this happens seamlessly every day to balance workloads, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThat said, the loss of multiple data centers within an availability zone could cause serious issues, as things could reach a point where there simply isn\u2019t enough remaining capacity to handle all the work.\u201d<\/p>\n Amazon doesn\u2019t typically disclose the exact number of data centers it operates around the world.<\/p>\n It says only that its data centers are clustered in 39 geographic regions, with three such regions in the Middle East, covering the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel.<\/p>\n Each AWS region is split up into at least three data center availability zones, with each zone isolated and physically separated \u201cby a meaningful distance,\u201d although they are all within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of each other and connected by \u201cultra-low-latency networks\u201d that reduce the time lag for data transmission.<\/p>\n AWS says its data centers have redundant water, power, telecom, and internet connections \u201cso we can maintain continuous operations in an emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n They also have physical security, but those measures, including security guards, fences, video surveillance and alarm systems, are designed to keep out intruders rather than defend against missile attacks.<\/p>\n Chapple said the attacks are a reminder that cloud computing isn\u2019t \u201cmagical\u201d and \u201cstill requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios.\u201d<\/p>\n Data centers run by AWS and other operators are massive facilities that are hard to hide, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cOrganizations using services from any cloud provider in the Middle East should immediately take steps to shift their computing to other regions,\u201d Chapple said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Damage to three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East from\u00a0Iranian drone strikes\u00a0highlights the rapid growth of data centers in the region, as well as the industry\u2019s vulnerability to conflict. The company\u2019s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, said late Monday that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were \u201cdirectly struck\u201d and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[293,292],"tags":[290,291,200,201],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-middle-east","tag-amazon-web-services","tag-data-centers","tag-iran","tag-middle-east"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/owspakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n