ABU DHABI – Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon Web Services facilities in UAE and Bahrain, turning key sites of Gulf’s digital infrastructure into casualties of wider conflict.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has said that some of its data-centre infrastructure in UAE and Bahrain will not be brought back into operation after sustaining damage during drone attacks in March 2026. The company said several facilities in Bahrain remain unrecoverable, while one facility in UAE has also been ruled out for restoration. AWS operates three Availability Zones in its Bahrain region, according to information published by the company.
The damage occurred during wider escalation in Middle East. US and Israel carried out military strikes against Iran. Iran subsequently launched missile and drone attacks against Israel and Gulf countries that host U.S. military facilities, including Bahrain and the UAE.
AWS infrastructure was among commercial facilities affected. In UAE, two facilities belonging to company’s me-central-1 region were hit. Reports described fires, electrical and structural damage, connectivity failures and water damage caused by firefighting systems. In Bahrain, a drone attack close to an AWS facility also damaged infrastructure in the me-south-1 region.
The consequences extended beyond physical buildings. Customers using AWS services in the affected regions encountered interruptions involving computing, storage, databases, and other cloud-management functions. Services such as EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda and RDS experienced availability problems. Businesses that depended on those systems, including financial services, payment platforms and delivery and transport applications, were also affected.
AWS’s latest assessment shows that the UAE and Bahrain have not experienced identical levels of damage. In Bahrain, the destruction affected infrastructure across several Availability Zones. These zones are normally separated so that customers can continue operating if one location fails. In this case, however, the scale of the physical damage extended across multiple zones, leaving AWS unable to recover certain resources that had not been replicated or moved elsewhere.
AWS helped customers transfer their operations to other geographic regions where backups or additional copies were available. The company has indicated that another assessment of the Bahrain region is expected in early 2027.
The situation in UAE remains partly recoverable. AWS has determined that resources and data stored solely in mec1-az2 cannot be restored. At the same time, recovery work is continuing in other parts of the me-central-1 region, including mec1-az1 and mec1-az3. AWS is replacing damaged equipment and infrastructure and says further information will be provided as that work progresses.
Cloud platforms are designed around redundancy. Customers can distribute workloads between Availability Zones and maintain backups so that the failure of one facility does not bring an entire application offline. March attacks demonstrated the limits of that model when multiple facilities in the same geographic region are damaged simultaneously.
Customers that had already copied their information to another AWS region, maintained independent backups or moved their workloads elsewhere were generally able to resume operations. The greater problem involved information that existed only on infrastructure that was subsequently deemed unrecoverable. For those customers, AWS cannot simply recreate data that no longer exists on accessible infrastructure. This means that information without a separate copy may be permanently unavailable.
The incident has implications beyond AWS and its customers. UAE and other Gulf states have been investing heavily in data centres, artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure. Major technology and investment companies have been involved in expanding computing capacity across the region. The attacks highlighted the physical risks associated with concentrating large amounts of digital infrastructure in areas exposed to regional conflict.
Future projects may therefore place greater emphasis on geographic separation, stronger physical protection and disaster-recovery arrangements. Questions around insurance, investment risk and the security of large computing facilities are also likely to receive greater attention.
The events have also drawn attention to the increasingly strategic role of commercial data centres. Modern facilities can support financial systems, AI applications, government services, logistics, communications and other activities that are important to national economies and security.
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