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Amazon confirmed that drone strikes physically damaged AWS facilities in the Middle East (UAE) Region me-central-1 and the Middle East (Bahrain) Region me-south-1, triggering a prolonged outage affecting dozens of cloud services. AWS reported structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases fire-suppression activity that caused additional water damage; multiple Availability Zones remained impaired, including mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 in the UAE and a continuing localized power issue impacting mes1-az2 in Bahrain. Amazon said it is restoring physical infrastructure while also pursuing software-based recovery paths and prioritizing tools that enable customers to back up and migrate workloads out of the impacted regions.
Incident reporting on the outage described an “unusual physical incident” in me-central-1 where external objects struck a data center, causing sparks and a fire that led authorities to require a full power shutdown (including backup generators), taking down EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and RDS databases in the affected zone. Customers also experienced significant impairment of EC2 networking APIs (including AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, and DescribeNetworkInterfaces), with AWS using traffic-weighting and configuration changes to shift load and restore functionality, though some API recovery lagged and constrained actions like reassigning Elastic IPs. AWS advised impacted customers to back up data and migrate workloads to unaffected regions while recovery continued.
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16 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
In an April 30, 2026 update, AWS said its damaged UAE and Bahrain regions would require several more months before returning to normal operations and could not support customer applications during recovery. AWS said relevant billing operations were suspended and again urged customers to migrate workloads to other regions and rely on remote backups.
By 2026-04-03, reporting said Iran's IRGC claimed it had struck a data center linked to Oracle in Dubai as part of its campaign against U.S. technology firms in the region. Dubai authorities denied the reported Oracle-linked strike, while the article said the full extent of impacts remained uncertain.
On 2026-04-01, Intel said it was taking steps to protect its personnel and facilities in the Middle East after Iran's IRGC threatened U.S. tech companies operating there. The U.S. government also said it was prepared to defend the threatened companies and prevent Iranian attacks.
A WIRED report published on 2026-03-31 said the IRGC threatened to begin attacks after 8 pm Tehran time on April 1 against more than a dozen American companies operating in the Middle East. Named firms included Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, and Boeing, which Iran accused of supporting U.S. military and intelligence operations.
On 2026-03-26, AWS expert Corey Quinn reported that Amazon had emailed customers using the affected ME-CENTRAL-1 facility to waive all March 2026 usage-based charges. AWS said the credit would be applied automatically and customers did not need to take any action.
On 2026-03-11, Iranian state-affiliated media reportedly published a list of Western technology company facilities in the Middle East it called legitimate targets for retaliatory strikes. The list included sites tied to Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir across Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, and the UAE.
By 2026-03-07, reporting said Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had claimed it targeted the Bahrain AWS facility, alleging it hosted U.S. military workloads. AWS declined to comment on the claim, while an Air Force contractor said classified IL4 and IL5 workloads are hosted only in U.S.-based facilities.
By 2026-03-03, AWS reported some recovery progress and partial improvements across affected services, though major disruption persisted because damaged physical infrastructure remained offline. The company continued recommending customer migration and failover to unaffected regions.
On 2026-03-03, Amazon confirmed that drone strikes had damaged multiple AWS data center facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting roughly 60 services and later described in reporting as affecting more than 100 services. Amazon said it was prioritizing both physical restoration and software-based recovery paths.
By the morning of 2026-03-02, AWS said multiple UAE availability zones remained impaired, with elevated S3 and DynamoDB errors, data ingest and egress failures, and management console and CLI issues. In Bahrain, AWS was still working to restore power in mes1-az2 and said there was no firm restoration timeline.
By 6:01 PM PST on 2026-03-01, AWS said AssociateAddress API requests had been restored and introduced a way to forcefully disassociate Elastic IPs from resources stranded in the powerless facility. This allowed customers to reattach IPs to replacement resources in healthy zones.
On 2026-03-01, AWS started shifting traffic to healthy availability zones and pursuing software-based recovery while restoring damaged infrastructure. The company advised customers to execute disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups, and migrate or redirect workloads to other regions.
As the physical damage unfolded on 2026-03-01, outages and degradation spread across dozens of AWS services including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, RDS, Kinesis, CloudWatch, and management APIs. Reports indicate mec1-az3 also went offline, leaving only partial operation in mec1-az1 and disrupting regional customers such as Careem, payment providers, banks, and Snowflake.
After the March 1 strike, sparks and a fire at the UAE site led local authorities and firefighters to shut down the affected facility and its backup generators in mec1-az2. This took EC2 instances offline and disrupted EBS, RDS, and other resources in the availability zone.
On 2026-03-01, drone strikes hit AWS infrastructure in the Middle East: two UAE facilities in ME-CENTRAL-1 were directly struck and a Bahrain facility in ME-SOUTH-1 was damaged by a nearby strike. The attacks caused structural damage, power disruption, and in some cases fire-suppression-related water damage.
On 2026-02-28, U.S. and Israeli military strikes reportedly killed senior Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and were cited as the trigger for subsequent Iranian retaliatory actions in the Gulf. Dark Reading also reported Iran's internet traffic dropped to under 1% across major networks after these strikes.
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Amazon Web Services reported prolonged outages and permanent customer-data loss after alleged Iranian drone, missile, and cruise-missile strikes damaged its data-center facilities in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. AWS has suspended billing for affected regional customers, advised them to move workloads to other cloud regions, and told customers with inaccessible resources to restore them from remote backups; it has not set a timetable for repairs or service restoration. The strikes occurred amid regional escalation following U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, with incidents reported from March through a later missile strike on a remaining Bahrain facility. The disruption has affected infrastructure used by banking and financial-sector organizations, while Iranian state media claimed the Bahrain site was destroyed. The IRGC also claimed an attack on an Oracle-linked Dubai data center and threatened other U.S. technology companies; AWS said it will continue supporting Bahrain customers and provide another update in early 2027.
Sep 16, 2026
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a significant outage originating in its US-East-1 region, which is one of the company's most critical data hubs. The incident began early Monday morning, with AWS reporting increased error rates and latency for multiple services, including EC2, Lambda, and DynamoDB. The root cause was identified as a Domain Name System (DNS) resolution failure affecting the DynamoDB API endpoint, which quickly cascaded to impact a wide array of dependent AWS services. As a result, dozens of major websites, applications, and online platforms worldwide became inaccessible or experienced severe slowdowns. Consumer-facing services such as Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite, Zoom, Snapchat, Amazon Alexa, Ring, Robinhood, Max (HBO), Chime, Venmo, Epic Games, McDonald's, Lyft, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, Signal, and major telecom carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile were all affected. The outage also disrupted PC gaming platforms like Steam, online forums such as Reddit, and popular banking and financial apps, including Coinbase and Robinhood. Even Amazon's own services, including Amazon.com and Prime Video, suffered partial outages. The effects of the outage were not limited to North America; major banks in the UK and the European Union, such as Lloyds Banking Group, and some government sites also experienced downtime. AWS engineers worked on multiple parallel paths to accelerate recovery, applying initial mitigations and observing signs of service restoration within a few hours. The outage highlighted the critical dependency of the modern internet on AWS infrastructure, as disruptions in a single region can have global repercussions. AWS's service health dashboard confirmed that at least 28 separate AWS services were impacted during the incident. Customers were advised to retry failed requests and monitor for further updates as AWS continued to address the issue. The incident also affected global services or features that rely on US-East-1 endpoints, such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables. Some AI services, including Perplexity, were also reported to be struggling during the outage. The event underscored the importance of DNS reliability and the potential for single points of failure within cloud infrastructure. AWS communicated regularly with customers throughout the incident, providing updates on the root cause and recovery progress. By the end of the morning, AWS announced that the outage had been resolved, and services were returning to normal operations. The widespread impact of this outage serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of cloud services and the need for robust contingency planning for critical internet infrastructure.
Jun 29, 2026
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said its Aerospace Force struck and destroyed Amazon Web Services’ Bahrain data center during the latest wave of **Operation Nasr-2**, describing the attack as retaliation for an alleged U.S. strike on Iran’s under-construction Darkhovin nuclear site. Iranian state media portrayed the AWS facility as a wartime target, while Bahrain said its air defenses intercepted several incoming Iranian threats and did not report damage to any Amazon site; no independent verification of the destruction claim has emerged. Reports said the AWS Bahrain region, `ME-SOUTH-1`, had already been severely disrupted after an earlier Iranian drone attack allegedly caused a power failure and fire, prompting Amazon to shift customers to other sites, advise migrations, and later pull engineers because of security risks. Even if the latest strike claim remains unconfirmed, the incident underscores that commercial cloud infrastructure in the Middle East is being openly named in the escalating U.S.-Iran confrontation, with Amazon’s regional operations already operating under contingency measures to limit customer impact.
Jul 22, 2026