Amazon Web Services (AWS): AWS reports drones strike two UAE data centers, prompting

AWS confirmed that two of its three availability zones in the United Arab Emirates suffered physical damage after “objects” struck the facilities, igniting sparks and fire that forced local authorities to cut power, according to a report by The Register (Mann, 2 Mar 2026). The first incident hit the mec1‑az2 zone at 12:51 UTC; five hours later the company disclosed that the strike had created a blaze, prompting an immediate shutdown of power to contain the flames. By 18:46 UTC a second zone, mec1‑az3, experienced a cascading outage as power disruptions spread across the UAE, severely degrading services such as Amazon S3 storage. AWS noted that its architecture is designed to tolerate the loss of a single zone, but the simultaneous impairment of two zones pushed failure rates for data ingest and egress to “high” levels.

The disruptions are linked to a broader wave of Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks launched across the Gulf in response to recent U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran. The Register details that Tehran’s campaign targeted U.S. military installations and civilian infrastructure in the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, with the Amazon data centers caught in the crossfire. In Bahrain, a separate AWS zone (mes1‑az2) suffered a “localized power issue” at 06:56 UTC on Monday, which the outlet attributes to the same Iranian strikes that hit the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama. As of the latest AWS health‑dashboard update at 14:23 UTC, power to the Bahrain facility remained offline, and restoration was projected to take at least a day.

AWS’s remediation timeline underscores the complexity of repairing a modern hyperscale data center under conflict conditions. The company warned that full service restoration could require “at least a day” to address damage to cooling and power systems, coordinate with local authorities, and verify operator safety. Water damage from firefighting efforts further complicates the recovery, according to The Register. The outage has already rippled through the regional SaaS ecosystem; Snowflake, a data‑management firm, publicly attributed its own service interruptions in the Middle East to the AWS failures, highlighting the dependence of downstream providers on Amazon’s infrastructure.

The incident arrives at a moment when AWS is promoting its Middle East expansion, having recently opened multiple zones in the UAE to capture demand from oil‑rich economies diversifying into cloud services. The sudden loss of two‑thirds of its regional capacity not only erodes confidence among enterprise customers but also raises questions about the resilience of cloud providers operating near geopolitical flashpoints. While AWS has not disclosed the exact nature of the “objects” that struck the sites, the pattern of Iranian drone and missile activity suggests a deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure, a risk that other data‑center operators in the region now must factor into their risk‑management strategies.

Analysts observing the episode note that the outage could accelerate migration to alternative regions or multi‑cloud architectures, especially for workloads that cannot tolerate prolonged downtime. However, the scarcity of nearby sovereign cloud zones limits immediate alternatives, forcing customers to weigh the cost of data replication against the probability of future disruptions. As the Gulf remains a contested arena, AWS’s experience may serve as a case study for how hyperscale providers balance rapid market entry with the need for robust physical security and geopolitical risk assessments.