In an escalation of the ongoing Middle East conflict, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that Iranian drone strikes damaged three of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain in early March 2026.
According to AWS’s official status dashboard update, two facilities in the UAE were directly struck by drones, while one facility in Bahrain sustained physical damage from a nearby drone strike.
The company stated: “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.”
This marks one of the first publicly confirmed physical military attacks on a major hyperscale cloud provider’s infrastructure.
The incidents affected the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1), leading to outages and degraded performance for services including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and RDS.
AWS has described the recovery as prolonged and unpredictable due to ongoing regional instability.
Customers have been advised to activate disaster recovery plans and migrate workloads to other AWS regions where possible.
Impact on Businesses and Users
The attacks caused service interruptions for banks, delivery apps, government services, and enterprises across the Gulf that depend on these availability zones.
With data centres becoming strategic targets in modern conflicts, this incident highlights the physical vulnerabilities of cloud infrastructure, even for tech giants like Amazon.
AWS and local authorities have not reported casualties from the strikes.
For African businesses and developers heavily reliant on AWS; common for Nigerian fintechs, startups, and enterprises routing through global cloud providers, this serves as a reminder of geopolitical risks.
Experts recommend multi-region redundancy and regular failover testing to avoid similar disruptions.
Amazon has not released detailed images or extent of damage, citing security reasons.
Recovery efforts were reported as making progress in some areas, but full restoration timelines remain unclear.
