The Iran war continues to affect the operations of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates: It will be several months before the services are running normally again, Amazon has now informed its customers. Drone attacks on two AWS data centers in early March caused devastating damage. The so-called AWS region “ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE)” is affected.
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After two months, Amazon publicly informed about the current situation on a status page. Due to the damage “as a result of the conflict in the Middle East,” the cloud infrastructure can currently reliably support customer applications. “Although some workloads continue to function normally, we strongly encourage our customers to migrate all accessible resources to other regions as quickly as possible and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups.” While AWS restores operations in the region, customer billing is paused. The work is expected to take several more months.
Two different data centers in the United Arab Emirates were directly hit by drones, and another facility in Bahrain was affected by a drone strike nearby. At the time, Amazon spoke of “structural damage” from the impacts. Accordingly, the power supply was limited at the time. Fighting fires sometimes resulted in water damage.
The Iran war is also impacting Amazon’s business elsewhere. Online retailers who sell their goods via company websites now have higher costs. In the US and Canada, Amazon has been charging a 3.5 percent surcharge on its third-party fees for packaging and delivery of goods (Fulfilled by Amazon, FBA) since April 17. The reason is the increased fuel prices due to the Iran war. In the European Union, Amazon fulfillment fees are significantly more moderate due to lower fuel taxes in many member states.
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