What does Amazon war damage mean for Gulf cloud expansion?
Amazon’s cloud computing unit said the damage was sustained to its facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, casting doubt over multibillion-dollar investments in the region.
Amazon Web Services said on Tuesday that it cannot restore access to its cloud computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates after damage from attacks during the Iran war.
What happened: AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, said the damage in Bahrain spanned multiple so-called availability zones, which are clusters of one or more data centers in the same region, according to a company status update.
"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," AWS said in the status update. The company said it was helping Bahrain-based customers to reestablish operations in other regions.
AWS said it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one UAE availability zone, known as mec1-az2. The firm said it is continuing to work on recovering resources across the wider UAE region and in two other affected zones.
“Other AWS Services may also be experiencing increased errors and latencies for their workflows, and we are working to route requests away from this affected Availability Zone,” the company added.
