Amazon Web Services announced on Monday evening that drone attacks had wrecked two data centres in the United Arab Emirates and one facility in Bahrain, leaving them offline as part of the spiralling Middle East conflict that began with strikes on Sunday morning.
The company initially flagged the chaos on its AWS health dashboard, explaining that “objects” had slammed into UAE sites, sparking “sparks and fire,” while it probed power and network failures at the Bahrain location.
By 7:19 p.m. EST, AWS confirmed the cause as drone strikes tied to the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East.”
“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” AWS said. “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.”
Vital services like the EC2 virtual servers, S3 storage, and DynamoDB database suffered elevated errors and patchy availability, disrupting countless regional operations.
Though AWS is working urgently to restore access—even partially, without full site repairs—it anticipates a prolonged fix “given the nature of the physical damage involved,” with updates promised by midnight EST.
The firm cautioned that Middle East volatility persists, urging customers to back up data or shift workloads elsewhere to weather the uncertainty.
This episode underscores the conflict’s reach into tech infrastructure, aligning with reports from Reuters and the BBC on Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone salvoes against U.S.-Israeli targets. Bloomberg noted Brent crude prices leaping 5 per cent past $85 a barrel amid the turmoil, while Financial Times experts warn of knocks to global supply chains.
Amazon has also warned of shipping delays in the region, with notices on its platforms in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE citing “extended delivery time in your area.”