Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are exploring plans to redirect data center workloads from parts of West Asia to India and Singapore following Iranian drone strikes that damaged three AWS facilities on . According to industry sources cited by the Economic Times, cloud providers are seeking immediate capacity in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kochi to reroute critical workloads, particularly for banking clients.
What Happened
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Date of Incident | |
| Facilities Hit | Two AWS data centers in UAE (directly struck), one in Bahrain (damaged by nearby strike) |
| Services Disrupted | Banking apps, airport operations (Dubai, Kuwait), UAE stock market |
| AWS Status | 25 services disrupted, 34 degraded in ME-CENTRAL-1 region as of March 6 |
| Potential Destinations | India (Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi), Singapore |
Two Amazon Web Services facilities in the UAE were directly struck by drones, while a third facility in Bahrain sustained damage from a nearby explosion, according to AWS health dashboard updates. The strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases triggered fire suppression systems that produced additional water damage.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stated it targeted the Bahrain facility specifically because AWS hosts U.S. military infrastructure, according to Iranian state media reports.
The Rerouting Plans
Immediate capacity is being sought in locations including Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kochi to reroute critical workloads, especially for banking clients
, an infrastructure company executive told the Economic Times. Keeping latency in mind, these are the best-suited locations.
According to multiple reports, both Microsoft Azure and AWS are considering redirecting West Asia data traffic to facilities in India. Global hyperscalers and Indian conglomerates including Reliance Industries, Adani Group, Tata Group, and Larsen & Toubro have collectively committed approximately $270 billion toward data center infrastructure development in India.
These investments are expected to increase India’s cumulative data center capacity from about 1.4 gigawatts to around 10 gigawatts over the next five to seven years.
Technical and Legal Challenges
Executing large-scale data redirection presents formidable obstacles. Data sovereignty laws in nations like the UAE and Bahrain may prohibit the offshore processing of certain sensitive data, particularly government and financial sector information. Furthermore, increased latency from routing traffic to India could degrade performance for critical, real-time applications in finance and logistics.
The Middle East altogether represents a critical cloud region with cumulative data center capacity of approximately 1 gigawatt. Because the wider Gulf region is experiencing tensions, cloud providers are considering diverting traffic not only to Asia-Pacific regions but also to Europe and the United States.
What AWS Recommended
In recent health dashboard updates, AWS stated: We strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions. Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions.
The cloud provider expects recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved
, according to official statements.
Impact on Services
The outages cascaded into consumer-facing services across the Gulf. Ride-sharing and delivery platform Careem, payments firms Hubpay and Alaan, data management company Snowflake, and several major UAE banks including Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank all reported disruptions.
AWS’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region has three availability zones. The strikes took out two of them (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3), leaving the region significantly impaired. The Bahrain region (ME-SOUTH-1) lost one zone (mes1-az2) to a localized power issue.
Market Implications
Industry executives told the Economic Times that the rerouting of workloads is expected to be temporary. However, it could lead to increased long-term investments in India if global enterprise clients decide to build permanent backup infrastructure in the country.
According to Uptime Institute, this marks the first confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider, exposing the physical security of data centers as a tangible vulnerability in geopolitically unstable regions.
Neither AWS nor Microsoft has officially confirmed plans to permanently redirect traffic to India. However, any announcements regarding new disaster recovery services connecting their UAE regions to regions in India, or increased partnerships with Indian data center operators like Reliance, would signal this strategic pivot is underway.
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