As Iran conflict escalates, three AWS data centres in UAE & Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks, disrupting power, connectivity & cloud services

Amazon Web Services has confirmed that drone strikes damaged three of its data centre facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, triggering power failures and extended service disruption across the region.

The incidents took place on Sunday 1 March as tensions escalated following US and Israeli strikes against Iran.

AWS initially said that “objects” had hit a data centre in the UAE, causing “sparks and fire”, while it separately investigated power and connectivity problems at a site in Bahrain. By Monday, the company confirmed the cause was drone strikes.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritising the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.”

AWS update on the company’s cloud service dashboard

Two UAE facilities suffered direct impacts. In Bahrain, a drone strike near one site resulted in infrastructure damage.

Regional cloud services disrupted

The physical damage led to outages across several core AWS platforms, including EC2 compute, S3 storage and DynamoDB database services.

Customers experienced higher error rates and reduced availability as certain zones were forced offline or ran at constrained capacity.

In a later update, AWS reported “incremental progress” in restoring DynamoDB and S3 control planes but cautioned that recovery would not be immediate.

“We still estimate that the recovery time is at least a day before we are able to fully restore power and connectivity,” the company says.

Public dashboards indicate that two of the three affected data centre hubs remain heavily impaired. A third availability zone continues to operate normally, although some services have felt knock on effects due to dependencies on impacted zones.

Although AWS operates 123 availability zones spanning 39 regions worldwide, AWS urged Middle East customers to take immediate resilience measures.

“We recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads to alternate AWS Regions,” the company said.

Extended restoration timeline likely

AWS warns that structural damage to buildings and supporting systems could prolong downtime beyond typical outage scenarios.

“We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved,” says a company update.

AWS also pointed to the broader security climate in the region: “Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable.”

The strikes came as Iran launched waves of missiles and drones targeting US bases and allied nations including the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. US officials have indicated that operations may continue for weeks.

Cloud resilience tested by geopolitical risk

For the technology sector, the attacks underline the vulnerability of digital infrastructure to geopolitical instability.

Hyperscale cloud facilities are engineered with multiple layers of redundancy, resilient energy systems and advanced fire suppression. Yet direct physical assaults can compromise several safeguards at once.

In this instance, damage to power delivery systems was compounded by fire suppression efforts that introduced water damage inside the sites. Such combined effects can significantly lengthen restoration compared with routine hardware faults.

AWS has not revealed the precise locations or scale of the affected sites, though both the UAE and Bahrain function as critical cloud hubs serving customers across the Gulf.

As remediation work continues, organisations are leaning on multi region deployments and robust backup strategies to limit further disruption.

For technology leaders operating in higher risk regions, the episode reinforces the need for geographic redundancy, strong physical security and comprehensive contingency planning.