Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of the tech giant, confirmed that data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes amid escalating conflict in the Middle East. The incident caused significant disruptions to cloud services in the region and highlights the growing risks facing digital infrastructure in areas of instability.
In a statement, Amazon said the drone strikes caused “structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression.” The company also warned that the unstable situation could persist and continue to affect service availability in the region.
According to reports, two data centers in the UAE were directly struck by drones, while a third facility in Bahrain sustained damage following an attack near the AWS location. The damage reportedly affected power, cooling, and security infrastructure, forcing partial system shutdowns and power cuts imposed by local authorities.
The disruptions had a tangible impact on the availability of key AWS services, including EC2 virtual machines, S3 data storage, and DynamoDB NoSQL databases. Amazon advised customers in the region to activate backup and disaster recovery plans and to shift workloads to other AWS regions in order to minimize the impact of outages.
The incident occurred amid a broader wave of Iranian drone and ballistic missile attacks targeting sites in the UAE and other Gulf states, reportedly in response to earlier US and Israeli military actions against Iran. These strikes have affected multiple strategic civilian and infrastructure targets, with the damage now extending to critical digital infrastructure.
The disruption of AWS operations demonstrates that even distributed cloud infrastructure is not immune to the effects of armed conflict, particularly when data centers are located in high-risk regions. Industry experts note that cross-region redundancy and workload migration remain essential elements of cloud resilience strategies.