Drone strikes have damaged Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting services across the region.
Amazon’s cloud division confirmed that two facilities in the UAE “were directly struck”. It said the physical damage impaired services relied upon by businesses, financial institutions and government entities.
“Due to the continuing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes,” the AWS Health Dashboard said.
“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure.”
The company added that the strikes “have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage”.
AWS said it is working closely with local authorities and prioritising staff safety during recovery operations.
Gradual recovery
Customers in the UAE and Bahrain are experiencing “elevated error rates and degraded availability” affecting services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, as well as the AWS Management Console and command line interface, the company said.
AWS said recovery would be gradual given the scale of the physical damage. “We still estimate that the recovery time is at least a day before we are able to fully restore power and connectivity,” the company said.
Digital infrastructure in conflict zones
The cloud disruption comes as UAE banking customers reported outages affecting mobile applications and phone banking services.
Several major lenders, including Emirates NBD, Emirates Islamic, First Abu Dhabi Bank and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, experienced temporary digital service interruptions. Banks described the problems as intermittent and said technical teams were working to restore normal operations.
It remains unclear whether the banking outages were directly caused by AWS infrastructure damage, but the incidents unfolded amid a military escalation targeting regional digital infrastructure.
Vibin Shaju, EMA VP at California-headquartered cyber security company Trellix, told The National that the reported disruption to AWS infrastructure highlighted the region’s growing reliance on cloud providers, warning that while hyperscale platforms offer redundancy, concentration risk remains.
“When applications rely heavily on a single cloud environment, slowness or service interruption can quickly ripple across banking apps, airline booking systems and consumer-facing services,” he said.
The AWS incident mainly disrupted APIs and service availability, not core systems, but showed how reliance on shared infrastructure can create a “single point of impact” during conflict. Even secure internal systems still depend on internet and edge infrastructure to connect externally.
He added that the disruption highlights growing reliance on cloud providers, while hyperscale platforms offer redundancy, concentration risk remains, and issues in a single cloud environment can quickly ripple across banking, airlines, and consumer services.
