Amazon Cloud Unit's Data Centers In UAE, Bahrain Damaged In Drone Strikes

Source: Slashdot

Incident Overview

A Reuters report detailed drone strikes in the Middle East conflict with Iran that damaged Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, leading to prolonged outages of core cloud services. The initial report noted that “objects” triggered a fire at the data centers; later updates confirmed the incidents were drone strikes.

AWS Statement

AWS posted an update on its status page:

“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. 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. 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.”

The company added that the ongoing regional conflict makes the broader operating environment in the Middle East unpredictable.

Impact on Financial Institutions

Financial institutions that rely on AWS were affected. An anonymous source with direct knowledge confirmed the outage’s impact on their operations. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank reported that its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region‑wide IT disruption, though it did not explicitly link the issue to the AWS incident.

AWS advised customers to back up critical data and shift workloads to unaffected AWS regions.

Broader Implications

The strike on the UAE facility marks the first known disruption of a major U.S. tech company’s data center by military action. Washington‑based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) noted:

“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 centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints.”

This development raises questions about the pace of Big Tech’s expansion in the region and the security of critical digital infrastructure amid geopolitical tensions.