Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced outages in its Middle East operations on Monday after a data centre in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was struck by “objects,” causing sparks and a fire, the company said.
Two availability zones in the UAE lost power, while Bahrain experienced connectivity issues. AWS said recovery for both regions could take “many hours,” advising customers to rely on services in other regions while it works to restore power and connectivity.
The UAE incident occurred after sparks and fire were triggered at one of the cloud provider’s zones, prompting an immediate shutdown of power in the affected areas.
AWS did not confirm whether the outages were related to recent Iranian retaliatory strikes on neighbouring Gulf states, including the UAE and Bahrain, in response to U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.
The outages coincided with other challenges across regions, as Iranian strikes in the Gulf damaged infrastructure, including Dubai airport and the Burj Al Arab hotel, prompting questions about the possible link to AWS disruptions.
Separately, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) reported technical issues affecting its platforms and mobile app users on Monday.
While the bank did not confirm a direct link to AWS, the timing points to possible ripple effects from the data centre outages.
