AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now
Summary
After aerial strikes damaged AWS datacentres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, vendors including Red Hat, Snowflake and EMQX have urged customers to enact disaster recovery plans and fail over to alternate AWS Regions immediately. AWS has confirmed structural, power and and water damage at affected facilities and recommends restoring workloads in the US, Europe or Asia Pacific while monitoring the Personal Health Dashboard for updates.
Key Points
- Several SaaS and platform providers told customers not to wait for AWS to fully recover and to execute failover procedures now.
- Red Hat recommended recovery from remote backups into alternate Regions, ideally Europe, due to degraded products in the region.
- Snowflake warned users may not be able to sign in, run queries or manage data and advised customers using replication to initiate failover.
- EMQX performed a successful failover from the two hit Availability Zones to a remaining zone, running temporarily in single-AZ mode.
- AWS reported direct strikes on two UAE facilities and collateral damage in Bahrain, causing structural, power and water-related damage that impacted infrastructure.
Content Summary
Vendors with services hosted on AWS in the Middle East have issued urgent messages to customers to enact disaster recovery playbooks and move workloads to other regions. Red Hat stated its products were degraded in the affected region and advised customers to recover from remote backups into alternate Regions. Snowflake has no ETA for restoration and has specifically recommended customers using replication begin failover procedures. EMQX reported a successful failover to an operational Availability Zone but noted deployments in the UAE are temporarily running in single-AZ mode until AWS confirms multi-AZ recovery.
AWS confirmed that military-style drone and missile strikes caused physical damage to datacentre infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain, leading to disrupted power delivery and additional water damage from fire suppression. AWS strongly advised customers to migrate workloads to unaffected Regions and to follow updates via the AWS Personal Health Dashboard.
Context and Relevance
The incidents are part of a wider wave of regional hostilities following military actions and have affected multiple sites across the Middle East, including shipping and commercial infrastructure. For organisations running critical services in the impacted AWS Regions, this is a concrete reminder that geopolitical events can cause physical damage to cloud infrastructure. The event highlights the importance of tested disaster recovery plans, cross-region replication and rapid traffic redirection for resilience.
Why should I read this?
If you’ve got anything running in AWS’ Middle East regions — don’t faff about. This is the kind of outage that hits production hard. Fail over, restore from remote backups and move traffic to a safe Region now. Quick, practical and potentially lifesaving for your services.
Author
Punchy: Vendors are shouting an urgent playbook at customers — if this affects you, the detail matters. If not, consider this a useful time-saver: the vendors did the heavy lifting so you don’t have to trawl status pages.