Kamal Ghorui
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has reportedly accepted that the ongoing Iran war poses challenges for the world’s biggest cloud service provider. Speaking to CNBC at the HumanX conference in San Francisco, AWS CEO Garman termed it a difficult situation and said that Amazon employees are working round the clock to prevent service disruption for its customers in the Middle East region. “It’s a really difficult situation, and we’re working incredibly hard,” Garman said. He added, “In fact, we have teams, 24/7, working to make sure that we can keep our infrastructure up for our customers in that region.”Amazon’s cloud services have reported service disruption related to the Iran conflict in Bahrain and the UAE since early March. According to the AWS status page, dozens of AWS services in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates continue to remain unavailable as the Iran war has entered sixth week. Last week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard navy announced that it had targeted Amazon data center infrastructure in Bahrain. Garman maintained that the war is disruptive not just for the Middle East, but the entire global economy. “It’s obviously hugely disruptive for the global economy, as we’re all very dependent on energy, and also just distracting for industry, for us,” Garman said. “You know, there’s not short-term, immediate things, but it really is just the drag on the global economy that we have to think about.”Garman further added that technology is not the only industry seeing implications. “You just have to go further down the supply chain to find something, and so we’re not different than that,” he said.
AWS CEO sees ‘promise’ in Middle East
Garman, however, expressed optimism about the Middle East. “There’s a fantastic entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. “There’s a willingness to invest. And so our and my excitement about investing long term in that region is just as strong as it’s ever been.”
Amazon internal memo confirms some AWS zones unavailable
A recent report in Big Technology, quoting an internal Amazon memo, claimed that 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”. “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.”AWS has also reportedly advised customers to migrate their applications to alternate AWS Regions, and said that it had already helped a large number of users to do so.
