Amazon said some of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes in the Middle East conflict, disrupting cloud services and making a recovery “prolonged”.
Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf states in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday.
A strike on the UAE facility marks the first time a major US tech company’s data centre has been disrupted by military action. It raises questions around Big Tech’s pace of expansion in the region.
“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 impact to our infrastructure,” Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services said in an update 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.
“We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved,” it added.
AWS had previously said “objects” had triggered a fire on Sunday that forced authorities to eventually cut power to a cluster of Amazon data centres in the UAE, with restoration expected to take at least a day.
Wide impact
Financial institutions that use AWS services have been affected by the outage, one person with direct knowledge of the situation said, requesting anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
“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,” AWS said.
US tech giants have been positioning the UAE as a regional hub for AI computing needed to power services such as ChatGPT. Microsoft said in November it plans to bring its total investment in the UAE to US$15-billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips for its data centres there.
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“In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries and oil fields in Gulf partner states. In the compute era, these actors could also target data centres, energy infrastructure supporting compute and fibre chokepoints,” Washington-based think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies said last week.
Microsoft as well as Google and Oracle — which also operate facilities in the UAE — did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The AWS outage disrupted a dozen core cloud services and the company advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to servers in unaffected AWS regions.
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, although it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident. — Shubham Kalia, Aditya Soni, Mrinmay Dey and Hadeel Al Sayegh, with Rajveer Singh Pardesi and Gnaneshwar Rajan, (c) 2026 Reuters
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