Drones damaged Amazon facilities in the UAE and Bahrain: what is known
3 March 15:40
Amazon Web Services’ cloud division reported prolonged service disruptions after three data centers in the Middle East were damaged by drone strikes. This was reported by Bloomberg , according to "Komersant Ukrainian".
The company said that two facilities in the United Arab Emirates were directly hit. In Bahrain, a drone strike near a data center damaged the infrastructure.
According to AWS, two of the three regional hubs “remain significantly impacted.” The third zone continues to operate, but some services are indirectly affected due to their dependence on the damaged centers.
The company warned customers about increased error rates and reduced service availability and recommended creating backups and transferring workloads to alternative regions. In total, AWS has 123 data center zones in 39 regions around the world.
War and digital infrastructure
The incident occurred amid escalation in the region. After Israel and the US struck targets in Iran and structures linked to Hezbollah, Tehran announced a response. Among the targets were facilities in Bahrain and the UAE.
The escalation affected not only the military but also the economic sphere. Due to the risks, tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has almost stopped. At the opening of trading on March 2, the price of Brent crude oil jumped more than 13% to over $82 per barrel.
There were also reports of a shutdown at the Ras Tanura oil refinery in Saudi Arabia, an attack on the US-flagged tanker Stena Imperative in the port of Bahrain, and the suspension of liquefied gas production by the state-owned company QatarEnergy after strikes on its facilities.
What this means
The damage to data centers demonstrates the vulnerability of digital infrastructure in the context of regional conflict. AWS cloud services serve government agencies, banks, media, logistics companies, and the energy sector.
A prolonged recovery could impact business processes in the region and increase demand for geographically distributed backup solutions and multi-regional data storage architectures.
