Drones attack several AWS Middle East region data centers amid Iran war, leading to outages — service health been disrupted after power cut due to fire risk

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Image credit: Getty / Mark Felix

Amazon’s data center business in the Middle East has been adversely impacted amid the 2026 Iran Conflict. The AWS Health Dashboard notes ongoing issues with multiple services at its data centers in the region. Specifically, the status page reports service disruptions/impacts at AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME‑CENTRAL‑1) and AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME‑SOUTH‑1).

“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,” — AWS Health Dashboard.

These incidents have precipitated dozens of ‘disrupted,’ ‘degraded,’ and ‘impacted’ services.

From broader reporting of the conflict, the drone strikes appear to be part of Iran’s response to U.S. Operation Epic Fury and Israeli Operation Roaring Lion strikes on Iranian targets over the weekend. Both the UAE and Bahrain data centers were hit by drones in the early hours of March 1. Whether Iran purposely targeted AWS facilities cannot be confirmed.

Image credit: AWS

ME-CENTRAL-1 in the UAE

The latest update for AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME‑CENTRAL‑1) states that “teams continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams.” Engineers are working to safely restore the full gamut of AWS services.

AWS strongly recommends that customers with workloads running in the Middle East migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions as soon as possible. Suggested actions include:

• Enacting disaster‑recovery plans.
• Recovering from remote backups stored in other Regions.
• Updating applications to direct traffic away from the UAE region for now.

ME-SOUTH-1 in Bahrain

For AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME‑SOUTH‑1), engineers are “continuing to work toward restoring power in the affected Availability Zone (mes1‑az2).” No firm time or date has been provided for full power restoration and connectivity; significant work remains.

As with ME‑CENTRAL‑1, AWS advises users to migrate or replicate their ME‑SOUTH‑1 data to another AWS Region.