Drone strikes have crippled Amazon Web Services across the Middle East. Three data centres sustained damage in a coordinated attack.
“Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes,”
Amazon Web Services confirmed that facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain took direct hits. The assault marks one of the most significant physical attacks on cloud infrastructure in recent years.
Operational Fallout Spreads Across Services
The damage triggered cascading failures throughout Amazon’s regional network. Customers attempting to access computing resources encountered widespread error messages.
“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.”
Structural compromise, power interruptions, and fire suppression water damage combined to knock critical systems offline. Amazon EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch, RDS, and management console services all reported degraded performance. Engineers confirmed that operations outside these two Gulf states remain unaffected.
“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.”
Recovery Timeline Remains Uncertain
Amazon engineers are coordinating with local emergency response teams to assess repair requirements. The company acknowledged that restoration efforts face serious obstacles.
“Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,”
Technicians are attempting to bring redundant systems online that bypass the damaged physical locations entirely. Amazon recommended that regional customers immediately replicate critical data to alternative zones in Australia, Asia Pacific, the United States, or Europe. The company holds roughly 30 per cent of worldwide cloud computing market share and supports over four million businesses globally. Iranian forces targeted American military installations in both countries following the targeted killing of Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei ordered by President Donald Trump.