AWS-Hosted Tech Providers Urge Middle East Customers to Fail Over After Datacenter Strikes

Summary

Following aerial strikes that damaged AWS datacenters in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, major technology providers including Snowflake, Red Hat, and EMQX are urging customers to immediately enact disaster recovery plans and migrate workloads to other regions. The attacks, part of broader Iranian missile and drone strikes targeting multiple sites across the Middle East, caused structural damage, power disruptions, and water damage from fire suppression activities at AWS facilities.

AWS has recommended that customers with workloads in the affected Middle East regions take immediate action to migrate to alternate regions in the US, Europe, or Asia Pacific. The company stated it will provide future updates directly to affected customers through the AWS Personal Health Dashboard. Red Hat reported degraded services and advised customers to recover from remote backups into alternate AWS regions, ideally in Europe.

Snowflake customers in the affected regions are experiencing inability to access core services, including sign-in, query execution, and data management, with no estimated time of restoration yet available. The company is recommending affected customers using replication initiate failover procedures immediately. EMQX successfully failed over from two hit availability zones to an operational one, though deployments in the UAE are now running in temporary single-AZ mode until AWS confirms full recovery of multiple availability zones.

• Snowflake customers face service disruptions with no estimated restoration time, while EMQX successfully failed over to single-AZ operation