American tech giant Amazon has confirmed that several of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged in drone attacks, causing widespread disruptions to its cloud services across the Middle East.
The strikes, linked to the ongoing regional conflict, triggered power outages, fires and structural damage, affecting financial institutions and thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon said two of its data centers in the UAE were directly struck in drone attacks.
The impact disrupted power supply to the facilities and caused structural damage. A fire broke out at one data center, and emergency fire suppression efforts, including water use, led to additional damage.
In Bahrain, a drone that fell near one of Amazon’s sites caused physical damage to infrastructure.
Cloud services across Middle East affected
According to Amazon Web Services, multiple services experienced outages in the UAE and Bahrain due to the damage.
The company reported error rates in key services, including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and CLI.
Dozens of applications and essential cloud services were disrupted, affecting financial institutions and other major clients across the region.
However, Amazon clarified that services outside the UAE and Bahrain were not impacted.
Recovery expected to take time
Amazon said restoring full operations will take time due to structural damage, disrupted power delivery and ongoing regional instability.
The company is working with local authorities to resume services as quickly as possible. It is also attempting to restore services that do not require full repairs of the affected data centers.
Due to the extent of the damage and continued strikes in the Middle East, Amazon described the recovery process as complex.
Customers advised to shift operations
Amazon advised customers with workloads in the Middle East to back up their data and migrate operations to alternative regions.
Suggested alternatives include Australia, the wider Asia-Pacific region, the United States, and Europe.
“Even as we work to restore these facilities, the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” the company said.
Amazon currently holds an estimated 30% of the global cloud market and powers more than four million businesses worldwide.
The incident has raised concerns about the vulnerability of major US technology infrastructure in the Gulf region, where companies such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle also operate similar facilities.
Drone debris incident at Fujairah port
In a separate development, drone debris fell at the Port of Fujairah in the UAE. Emirati authorities confirmed that debris landed in the Fujairah Oil Industry Zone, causing a fire that has since been brought under control.
No casualties were reported in the incident.
The attacks on Amazon’s facilities come amid ongoing Iranian drone and missile strikes on Gulf states, launched in retaliation for US-Israeli military operations.
The situation underscores how escalating geopolitical tensions are increasingly affecting not only military targets but also critical technology and economic infrastructure in the Middle East.
