Khaberni - Amazon reported on Monday that some of its data centers in the UAE and Bahrain had incurred damages due to drone attacks in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, disrupting online cloud services and taking a "long time" to restore services.
Iran launched a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf states in response to American and Israeli strikes that killed the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday.
The strike targeting the Amazon facility in the UAE marks the first time a data center of a major US technology company has been disrupted due to military action. This raises questions about the pace of expansion of major technology companies in the region.
Amazon’s cloud services unit updated that "in the UAE, two of our facilities were directly hit, while in Bahrain, a drone strike near one of our sites caused physical damage to our infrastructure."
The unit added "These strikes resulted in structural damage, disruption of power supplies to our infrastructure, and in some cases, required fire-fighting measures, which led to further damage from water."
The unit continued "We are working to fully restore the service as soon as possible, but we expect recovery to take a long time due to the nature of the physical damage."
A well-informed source told Reuters that financial institutions that use those units were affected by this disruption. The source requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The unit stated "While we work on restoring these services, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable."
American technology giants view the UAE as a regional hub for computing based on artificial intelligence necessary to operate services like ChatGPT.
Microsoft said in November that it plans to increase its total investments in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will equip its data centers there with Nvidia chips.
Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, which also operate facilities in the UAE, have not yet responded to Reuters' requests for comment.
The interruption of Amazon's unit service disrupted dozens of essential cloud services, and the company advised its clients to back up important data and shift operations to servers in unaffected areas.
