Escalating military tensions in West Asia have begun to affect critical digital infrastructure. Drone attacks in the Gulf region have reportedly damaged 3 data centres operated by Amazon Web Services, leading to technical disruptions and reduced availability of several online services across the region.
According to the company, the incident took place on March 1, 2026, when an object struck an AWS facility in the United Arab Emirates, causing sparks and a fire inside the premises. A day later, confirmation emerged that 3 facilities located in the UAE and Bahrain had been affected by drone attacks. One of the data centres in Bahrain suffered damage after a drone strike occurred in close proximity to the facility.
AWS confirmed that its two key cloud operation hubs in the Middle East — ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) — were significantly impacted. The attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power supply systems, and resulted in water damage during fire suppression efforts. Several core services experienced performance issues, including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon CloudWatch. Other affected systems included Amazon RDS, Amazon Kinesis, as well as the AWS Management Console and CLI infrastructure. The company said service restoration may take longer because some parts of the facilities suffered structural damage. AWS is currently working on a software-based recovery approach to restore data access and cloud operations without depending heavily on the damaged infrastructure.
Amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, AWS also warned customers about possible operational uncertainty in the Gulf region. The company said service delivery may face delays and system error rates could temporarily increase. Cybersecurity and infrastructure experts believe the incident highlights growing risks to global digital infrastructure security. Energy networks and cloud data centres in the Gulf are considered strategically important, and attacks on such facilities could have wider economic and technological effects. The report also noted that drone strikes damaged parts of the power distribution network and fire safety systems, making repairs more complicated. In some cases, water used to control the fire affected server racks and networking hardware, adding further challenges to restoration. Experts have also warned that continued geopolitical tensions in West Asia may pose risks to global cloud stability. AWS said it is closely monitoring the situation and will keep affected customers informed. The company also confirmed that protecting data remains a top priority and there is currently no evidence of major data loss.
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