Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai

Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones “Hard Down” in Bahrain and Dubai, Per Internal AWS Communication

Amazon tells its employees to deprioritize these regions as the Iran war deals meaningful damage to its infrastructure in the Gulf.

Iranian strikes have rendered two Amazon Web Services availability zones “hard down” in Dubai and Bahrain and the company expects them to be “unavailable for an extended period,” according to internal Amazon communication reviewed by Big Technology.

Within Amazon Web Services, the strikes have rendered so much damage that employees have been advised to deprioritize both regions.

“These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency,” an internal memo read. “We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration.”

Reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson pointed Big Technology to an Amazon blog post about the disruptions. “We continue to support affected customers, helping them to migrate to alternate AWS Regions, with a large number already successfully operating their applications from other parts of the world,” the post read. “As this situation evolves, and as we have advised before, we request those with workloads in the affected regions continue to migrate to other locations.”

With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon’s Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three ‘availability zones’ or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are “hard down” and and “impaired but functioning.” per the internal communication.

“We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations,” the internal post said.