Three Amazon Web Services facilities in the Middle East suffered damage from Iranian drone strikes, exposing the vulnerability of cloud infrastructure to physical attacks. The company reported that two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were directly struck, while another in Bahrain sustained damage when a drone landed nearby.

AWS said the strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and triggered fire suppression systems that led to water damage. By late Tuesday, recovery efforts at the UAE facilities were progressing. Unlike previous AWS disruptions involving software issues that caused global outages, these attacks resulted in only localized and limited disruption.

Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame, noted that while Amazon typically designs its services to withstand the loss of a single data center, the destruction of multiple facilities within one availability zone could overwhelm remaining capacity. The attacks serve as a stark reminder that cloud computing requires physical infrastructure vulnerable to various disaster scenarios. Organizations using cloud services in the Middle East should immediately migrate their computing to other regions to avoid potential service interruptions.