Reuters — Updated At: 08:44 AM Mar 03, 2026 IST
Amazon said some of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, disrupting cloud services and making recovery “prolonged.”
Iran launched a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf states in the wider Middle East conflict. In the UAE, two AWS facilities were directly struck; in Bahrain, a drone strike near one of its facilities caused physical impact to infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on its status page.
“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,” AWS said. The company said it is working to restore full service availability but expects recovery to be prolonged given the physical damage.
AWS had earlier reported that “objects” triggered a fire on Sunday, forcing authorities to cut power to a cluster of Amazon data centres in the UAE; restoration had been expected to take at least a day. The outage affected a dozen core AWS cloud services, and the company advised customers to back up critical data and move operations to unaffected AWS regions.
A person with direct knowledge of the situation told Reuters that financial institutions using AWS services were affected. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, without directly linking the outage to the AWS incident.
U.S. tech firms have been positioning the UAE as a regional AI computing hub. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total UAE investment to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centres there. Google and Oracle also operate facilities in the UAE; Microsoft, Google and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that in the compute era, adversaries that previously targeted pipelines, refineries and oil fields could also target data centres, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints.
