Missile strikes push AWS customers to activate disaster recovery across regions

Cloud customers across the Middle East have begun shifting workloads to other regions after missile and drone strikes damaged several Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, disrupting cloud services relied on by regional businesses.

Technology companies like Snowflake, Red Hat, and Internet of Things platform EMQX have asked their users to enable their disaster recovery options as the disruption of services persists in the region. The outage has caused some companies to be unable to access crucial cloud services, and they have been forced to move their services to other regions.

Red Hat confirmed that several of its products experienced degraded performance in the affected locations. The company urged customers to restore services from remote backups stored in other AWS regions. It specifically recommended moving workloads to locations in Europe where possible while the situation stabilizes. Red Hat also indicated that further updates regarding service availability would come through AWS as recovery efforts continue.

Snowflake reported that some users in the impacted regions could not sign in to their accounts, run queries, or manage stored data. The company said it could not yet estimate when normal service would return. In the meantime, Snowflake encouraged customers who use cross-region replication to initiate failover procedures in order to resume operations elsewhere.

IoT platform EMQX also experienced disruption because the outage affected its infrastructure deployments. The company said its systems successfully failed over from two impacted availability zones to another that remained operational. However, EMQX noted that its regional environment currently operates in a temporary single availability zone configuration until AWS restores full capacity.

Amazon confirmed that the damage occurred during an exchange of missile and drone attacks across parts of the Middle East. According to the company, two facilities in the United Arab Emirates sustained direct strikes, while a nearby drone attack damaged infrastructure connected to an AWS data center in Bahrain. The strikes caused structural damage and disrupted power systems inside the facilities. In some locations, fire suppression activity also contributed to additional damage.

AWS said several services have gradually returned online but advised customers with workloads in the region to migrate traffic to other AWS regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific where possible. The company continues to provide status updates to affected customers through its AWS Personal Health Dashboard.