Iranian Drone Strikes Hit Three Amazon Web Services Data Centers, Raising Gulf AI

AWS confirmed that two of its three availability zones in the ME‑CENTRAL‑1 region were taken offline after Iranian Shahed‑136 drones struck data‑center facilities in the United Arab Emirates, while a third site in Bahrain suffered damage from a nearby explosion. The Uptime Institute called the incident “the first confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider,” noting that EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS and other core services experienced outages across the affected zones (Tom’s Hardware).

Iran’s state television said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the strikes to “identify the role of these centres in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities,” according to The Guardian. The attacks triggered structural damage, power loss and fire‑suppression water releases that compounded the impact on the hardware racks (Tom’s Hardware). Amazon’s health dashboard listed the two UAE facilities as “directly struck” and the Bahrain location as “damaged by a nearby explosion,” confirming the physical nature of the breach (Tom’s Hardware).

The disruption rippled through the Gulf’s digital economy. Within hours, millions of residents in Dubai and Abu Dhabi were unable to complete routine transactions—taxi payments, food‑delivery orders and mobile‑banking checks—highlighting the reliance on AWS for everyday consumer services (The Guardian). Amazon has urged customers with workloads in the region to relocate or back up data elsewhere, warning that recovery could be prolonged given the extent of the damage (Tom’s Hardware).

Analysts see the incident as a watershed moment for regional cyber‑infrastructure security. Bloomberg reported that the coordinated drone barrage marks a shift from purely cyber‑operations to kinetic attacks on cloud assets, raising questions about the adequacy of existing missile‑defence systems around data‑centre sites (Bloomberg). The event also underscores the strategic value of cloud platforms in modern conflict, as the U.S. tech giant’s infrastructure was explicitly targeted for its perceived role in supporting adversary intelligence (The Guardian).

AWS has not disclosed a timeline for full restoration, but its health dashboard shows ongoing remediation efforts. The company’s statement emphasized that the physical damage to power and cooling systems will require extensive repairs before the two UAE zones can resume normal operations (Tom’s Hardware). Meanwhile, the broader industry is watching closely; the strike may prompt multinational cloud providers to reassess the geographic distribution of critical workloads and to invest in hardened, redundant facilities to mitigate future kinetic threats.