Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed late Monday that drones directly struck two data centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with a nearby Bahrain facility also damaged, disrupting cloud services across the Middle East.
The attacks, linked to spillover from U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and senior officials, caused structural damage, power outages, fires, and water from suppression systems at the world’s largest cloud provider.
AWS reported elevated error rates and degraded availability for services like Amazon EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS, and the management console in affected regions, initially noting “objects” Sunday before specifying drones Monday.
No staff injuries were reported; AWS prioritizes safety, coordinating with UAE and Bahrain authorities for gradual recovery estimated at least a day, urging customers to backup data and shift workloads elsewhere amid unpredictable conditions.
Gulf cities faced outages impacting banks, businesses, governments, and AI apps, highlighting cloud vulnerabilities in conflicts; AWS competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud across 123 global zones.
The incidents underscore regional digital infrastructure risks as U.S.-Iran hostilities escalate.
