Amazon Web Services Says drones struck three facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain

With input from BBC, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon’s cloud arm confirmed a grim reality check for tech infrastructure: drones hit two of its data centers in the UAE and a nearby strike in Bahrain damaged a third site, knocking services offline and causing structural, power and water-damage headaches.

The company said the incidents happened Sunday morning and that “objects” first showed up on its health dashboard; by Monday AWS had confirmed the outages were caused by drone strikes tied to the broader conflict with Iran after recent strikes by the United States and Israel. Two UAE sites were directly struck, while the Bahrain facility was hit by a blast nearby, the update said.

Damage wasn’t just cosmetic. Amazon warned the strikes disrupted power delivery, caused structural harm, and in some cases fire suppression efforts led to additional water damage — all of which complicates getting systems back up. Several core services, including virtual servers and storage, showed “elevated error rates and degraded availability,” AWS added.

The company is scrambling to restore access and urged customers with workloads in the region to back up data and consider moving critical systems to other regions. It also warned recovery could take time “given the nature of the physical damage involved” and said the wider operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable.

The outages throw a spotlight on a fragile truth: even internet-scale tech depends on physical facilities that can be vulnerable in wartime. For now, Amazon says it’s working to restore services and will post updates — but for businesses and users in the region, the message was blunt and practical: assume disruption, secure your data, and be ready to reroute workloads.