Amazon services disrupted across Middle East after drones strike data centres

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing significant service disruptions across the Middle East after drone strikes damaged three of its regional data centers, the company confirmed on Tuesday.

At 1:04 pm UAE time, AWS warned users that operations in the Middle East Region would be affected for an extended period. Two facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” by drones, while another in Bahrain sustained damage, impacting infrastructure and service continuity.

“Customers with workloads in the Middle East should migrate to alternate AWS Regions immediately,” AWS advised. “Disaster recovery plans should be enacted, backups restored from other regions, and traffic rerouted away from the affected sites.”

The attacks come amid escalating regional tensions, following Iran’s retaliatory strikes against U.S. and Israeli operations. Earlier incidents set an Amazon UAE data center on fire, cutting power to the facility and causing prolonged outages across AWS operations in the region. Recovery is expected to be “prolonged” due to the physical damage.

AWS’s Middle East infrastructure supports more than just local clients. The UAE and Bahrain data centers host cloud services for fintech platforms in Africa, logistics networks in South Asia, media companies, health services, and even OpenAI’s planned UAE campus, which could serve half the world’s population.

Escalating Conflict

The wider Middle East conflict continues to escalate. On Tuesday, Israel launched attacks on Tehran and Beirut, deploying additional troops to southern Lebanon to secure border communities. According to Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, the operations aim to prevent direct fire on Israeli towns along the border.

As fighting intensifies, AWS customers across multiple sectors face potential service interruptions, emphasizing the critical role of disaster recovery planning and cross-region cloud resiliency in volatile regions.