March 4, 2026 Two Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” by drones over the weekend, causing structural damage and disrupting cloud services across parts of the Middle East. A facility in Bahrain was also impacted by a nearby drone strike, forcing AWS to recommend customers migrate workloads to other regions.
In updates posted to its service dashboard, AWS said the strikes caused “structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.” The company said it is working with local authorities and prioritizing employee safety but did not disclose whether any personnel were injured.
The disruption began Sunday when one UAE availability zone was “impacted by objects,” triggering “sparks and fire,” according to AWS. Fire services shut off power to the affected facility while extinguishing the blaze. AWS said recovery would take at least a day due to repairs to cooling and power systems and safety assessments. As of Tuesday morning, the AWS Health Dashboard described the disruption as ongoing.
Customers across the region reported service interruptions. ADCB said its mobile banking app and contact centre were temporarily unavailable, while Emirates NBD reported phone banking disruptions. Snowflake cited “elevated connectivity issues and error rates within the region,” and fintech firms including Sarwa and Hubpay reported service impacts before later restoring core functionality. Ride-hailing platform Careem said services were fully operational by Tuesday.
AWS operates three availability zones in the UAE. The company advised customers to enact disaster recovery plans and restore from remote backups into alternate AWS regions. “We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions,” AWS said in a Tuesday update.
