Casablanca – Amazon Web Services (AWS) said late Monday that drone strikes damaged two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and disrupted operations at a facility in Bahrain, causing widespread service outages across the region.
The company confirmed that two of its three Availability Zones in the Middle East, UAE region were significantly impaired after what it described as direct strikes. In Bahrain, a drone strike near one of its facilities caused physical damage to infrastructure, taking parts of the site offline.
According to AWS, the incidents occurred early Sunday morning. Objects struck one of the UAE data centers, creating sparks and fire.
Local fire crews shut off power to the affected facility and its generators while working to contain the blaze. The damage led to structural impacts, disruptions to power delivery, and, in some cases, fire suppression efforts that resulted in additional water damage.
The company said recovery efforts are ongoing and involve both physical repairs and software-based mitigation measures. Full restoration is expected to take at least a day, with some services dependent on rebuilding power and connectivity at the affected sites.
Core services disrupted across the region
Customers in the UAE and Bahrain experienced elevated error rates and degraded availability across several major services. Among the most affected were Amazon EC2, which provides virtual servers, Amazon S3 storage, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Other impacted services included AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console.
With two Availability Zones impaired in the UAE region, AWS said it was not possible to launch new EC2 instances in certain areas. Existing instances in the unaffected zone continued operating, though some services were indirectly affected due to dependencies on the damaged facilities.
AWS said it has made incremental progress restoring parts of its infrastructure. Newly written data to Amazon S3 can now be retrieved successfully, though access to data stored before the incident remains partially impaired.
DynamoDB error rates remain elevated, but the company expects gradual improvement as recovery continues.
Customers urged to migrate workloads
Throughout a series of updates, AWS advised customers with workloads in the Middle East to activate disaster recovery plans, restore from remote backups stored in other regions, and migrate applications to alternate AWS regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, where possible.
The company said it is prioritizing tools and services that enable customers to back up and move data away from the affected areas.
While some mitigation measures are being deployed at the software level, AWS acknowledged that full restoration of certain services will require physical repair of the damaged facilities.
AWS also warned that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable amid ongoing regional conflict, adding that further instability could continue to affect operations.
The company said it will continue issuing updates to affected customers through its health dashboard as recovery efforts progress.
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