Iranian Strikes Knock Two AWS Zones Offline in the Gulf
Amazon's cloud infrastructure in Dubai and Bahrain is "hard down" after Iranian military strikes hit the region.
Two AWS availability zones are completely offline after Iranian strikes damaged Amazon's cloud infrastructure in Dubai and Bahrain. An internal Amazon memo obtained by Big Technology describes the zones as "hard down" with no quick fix in sight.
Amazon expects the zones to be "unavailable for an extended period." The company has told employees to deprioritize these Gulf regions as the Iran conflict directly impacts its physical infrastructure.
This is a stark reminder that cloud computing still depends on actual hardware in actual buildings in actual geopolitical hotspots. The Gulf region has been a growing hub for hyperscale data centers, with AWS, Microsoft, and others racing to build capacity there.
For customers running workloads in those zones without multi-region redundancy, this is a very bad day. Possibly a very bad month.