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.

Even Africa’s most advanced economy, South Africa, is exposed to the oil price shocks, which could cause higher fuel costs, rising inflation and renewed pressure on currencies.

The government in Kenya is reassuring citizens that there are no immediate fears of a fuel shortage, and prices are yet to spike.

Many Governments across Africa are reassuring their citizens that they have stocks to last them for the time being. But they can’t make long term guarantees because many African nations depend on imported refined petroleum from the gulf.

This conflict just crossed the 12-day mark, and economist Kwame Owino tells Madowo that African nations should start preparing for a catastrophic scenario,

“while no African countries are directly involved in the conflict, we still suffer quite substantially. Governments need to adjust. So, for instance, the government of Kenya has some of the highest taxes globally on fuel prices so adjusting fiscal policy to allow for greater affordability is important, even if it means that government will have a lower take.”

Africa’s most advanced economy, South Africa, is one of those exposed to the oil price shocks. One South African airline, Flysafair, announced it would be adding a temporary dynamic fuel surcharge after jet fuel prices rose by 70% in one week at South African airports. Other airlines, including national carrier South African airways, said they were monitoring prices.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation and one of the largest economies. It is also a crude oil producer, so it’s likely to cash in on the increase in global oil prices. But Nigeria still imports refined petroleum, so it is not immune from the shocks that the global markets are seeing.

The bigger picture here is that African economies are more fragile than stronger, more advanced economies.

Owino says, “these economies are small and fragile. They are dependent on those imports. So when there’s a global conflict, it affects these economies. And African economies also tend to recover slowly, much slower to have a slower path of recovery.”

Fuel prices are holding steady right now. But if the conflict with Iran drags on, just about everything here in Kenya and across the African continent will get more expensive, adding more pain for African consumers.