Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed on March 1 that one of its data centres was struck by an object, triggering sparks and a fire inside the facility. A day later, on March 2, the company revealed that three of its facilities were impacted following drone strikes linked to escalating tensions involving Iran in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a nearby incident in Bahrain.
According to the AWS Health Dashboard, the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1) are currently described as “significantly impaired.” Two facilities in the UAE sustained direct hits, while the Bahrain data centre was affected due to a drone strike in close proximity.
AWS stated that both regions suffered physical infrastructure damage as a result of the strikes, which disrupted power supply and caused structural harm. In some cases, fire suppression measures led to additional water damage within the facilities.
The company acknowledged that customers are experiencing elevated error rates and reduced service availability across multiple AWS offerings. These include Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, as well as the AWS Management Console and CLI tools—services that support compute, storage, databases, serverless operations, analytics, monitoring, and infrastructure management.
AWS said it is actively working to restore services but warned that recovery efforts may take longer than usual due to the extent of the physical damage. The company is exploring software-based recovery solutions that do not rely solely on the affected facilities to re-establish data access and service functionality.
An update on restoration progress is expected by midnight, according to AWS. However, the company cautioned that ongoing regional instability could make operations unpredictable. Customers in the Gulf region have also been advised to expect extended delivery times for certain services.
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