Amazon has confirmed that three Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, leading to a widespread outage that continues to affect dozens of cloud services.
Although the company did not share detailed information about the incident, the attacks are believed to be linked to escalating tensions in the Middle East, possibly connected to Iran’s response to recent U.S. and Israeli military actions in the region.
According to Amazon, the drone strikes disrupted operations in the AWS Middle East UAE Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East Bahrain Region (ME-SOUTH-1). In a status page update published Monday at 4:19 PM PST, the company said that two facilities in the UAE were directly hit. In Bahrain, a nearby drone strike caused physical damage to infrastructure.
Amazon explained that the strikes resulted in structural damage and power disruptions. In some cases, fire suppression systems were activated, which led to additional water damage inside the facilities. The company said it is working closely with local authorities and focusing on the safety of its staff while recovery efforts continue.
At present, two availability zones in the UAE region, mec1-az2 and mec1-az3, remain significantly impaired. In Bahrain, the mes1-az2 availability zone is still dealing with a localized power issue.
Amazon said it is restoring physical infrastructure while also using several software-based recovery methods that do not require the damaged facilities to be fully operational. The company is giving priority to restoring services and tools that help customers back up their data and move applications out of the affected regions.
Customers impacted by the outage have been advised to activate their disaster recovery plans, restore data from backups stored in other regions, and redirect application traffic away from the affected areas. Amazon suggested considering AWS regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, depending on latency needs and data residency requirements.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre has warned British organizations about an increased risk of Iranian cyberattacks as tensions in the Middle East continue to rise.
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