Amazon said one of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates are experiencing power and connectivity issues after unidentified “objects” struck the facility, causing a fire, amid regional hostilities.
The service disruption, which affects Amazon’s MS-CENTRAL-1 region, raises questions about US plans to back the development of major AI data centre hubs in the UAE and nearby areas.
Unidentified “objects” hit the facility, causing issues with the mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 Availability Zones in the MS-CENTRAL-1 region, Amazon Web Services said.
Military action
Availability Zones are designated as descrete data centre facilities within a geographic region, each having independent power, cooling and networking, allowing customers to distribute their data across different locations and reduce the risk of a single point of failure.
AWS said the incident occurred in the early hours of Sunday, 1 March, coinciding with Iranian strikes on the UAE and other Gulf Arab states in response to Israeli and US military action against Iran.
Amazon said it expected recovery to take at least a day, as it requires repair of facilities, cooling and power systems, coordination with local authorities, and assessment of the risk to staff.
“EC2, Amazon DynamoDB and other AWS Services continue to experience significant error rates and elevated latencies,” AWS said.
Disaster recovery
It recommended customers to enact disaster recovery plans and to recover from remote backups to alternate AWS Regions, “ideally in Europe”.
It also recommended customers to update their applications to send S3 data to alternate AWS regions.
The US administration has over the past year pushed major deals for American companies to help build data centres in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in part to stem the influence of Chinese competitors.
