Was an Amazon Data Center Bombed in the Middle East?

Yes. On March 1, 2026, objects struck an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). AWS later said drone strikes directly hit two of its UAE facilities and damaged one in Bahrain. On September 15, 2026, AWS said it cannot restore data held only in its Bahrain Region or in one UAE Availability Zone.

What Hit the Amazon Data Centers in the UAE and Bahrain

At around 4:30 AM Pacific time on March 1, 2026, one Availability Zone (AZ) in the Middle East (UAE) Region, ME-CENTRAL-1, was hit, according to the AWS Health Dashboard. AWS said the zone was "impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire." The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. AWS first described the event as "a localized power issue."

The AWS Regions and Availability Zones page defines an Availability Zone as "one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity." For a general overview of how these facilities run, see how data centers work.

On March 2, 2026, AWS posted an update covering both affected Regions. It said "both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes." AWS wrote that two of its UAE facilities were "directly struck." In Bahrain, a drone strike "in close proximity to one of our facilities" caused physical impacts to AWS's infrastructure.

In the UAE Region, two of the three AZs, mec1-az2 and mec1-az3, were "significantly impaired." The third, mec1-az1, operated normally. For the Bahrain Region, ME-SOUTH-1, AWS first posted increased application programming interface (API) error rates in zone mes1-az2 on March 2, 2026 (Coordinated Universal Time, UTC).

Services with elevated errors included Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and command-line interface (CLI). AWS said it was "prioritizing the safety of our personnel."

AWS's posts do not name an attacker, do not report injuries, and do not say how many customers or how much data were affected.

A Timeline of the AWS Middle East Outage

AWS Health Dashboard posts and press reports cover the outage from the first strike on March 1, 2026 through AWS's September 15, 2026 update.

AWS's wording moved from "a localized power issue" on March 1 to "currently unavailable" for Bahrain on April 30, and then to restoration limits on September 15.

Who Attacked the Amazon Data Centers

AWS did not name an attacker in any of its posts.

Reporting places the data center strikes inside a wider conflict. A joint United States (US) and Israeli attack on Iran began on February 28, 2026, according to Al Jazeera, citing Reuters. Iran says it is retaliating by targeting US assets across Gulf Arab states. Al Jazeera, citing Reuters, described the UAE attack as the first time military action disrupted a major US tech company's data center.

On March 11, 2026, the IRGC threatened to attack "economic centres and banks" linked to US and Israeli entities in the region. The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim news agency published a list of offices and infrastructure of Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, calling them "Iran's new targets." Amazon is not among the six companies named. The report gives no date for that list.

On July 21, 2026, the IRGC claimed in a statement on its sepahnews.ir site that AWS's "central data infrastructure" in Bahrain was "destroyed" by "several cruise missiles." AWS did not reply to The Register. The Register said the claim was hard to verify because every AWS service in Bahrain had already been offline for months.

Neither the AWS posts nor the Al Jazeera and Register reports establish that Iran carried out the March strikes.

What Happened to Customer Data in Bahrain and the UAE

On September 15, 2026, AWS said it was "unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region" for Bahrain. For the UAE, it said it was "unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone." AWS is still recovering the other two UAE zones, mec1-az1 and mec1-az3, and is "replacing the affected infrastructure."

AWS said it will update the UAE status "in the coming months" and has "notified the relevant authorities." For Bahrain, it said it "will share a further update in early 2027."

In practice, "hosted exclusively" means the only copy of a customer's resources or data sits in that Region or zone. Data with a copy in another Region falls outside that description.

AWS said most UAE customers re-established operations in other Regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible. In Bahrain, AWS said most customers migrated to other Regions before the Region became unavailable. AWS Support helps customers move. On April 30, 2026, AWS said billing operations were suspended for both Regions while it restored normal operations, a process "expected to take several months." The Register reported on July 21, 2026 that AWS waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 in the UAE Region (me-central-1).

AWS has not said how many customers or how much data were affected.

In its March 2 update, AWS recommended that customers "exercise their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions." It also told customers to consider "AWS Regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific." Readers comparing Regions can start with data centers in Europe.

Why Backup Across Zones Was Not Enough

Each AWS Region has at least three Availability Zones, separated by "many kilometers" and all within 100 km (60 miles) of each other. On March 1, AWS said customers "running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event." That was an early assessment, made before more zones failed.

Two of the three UAE zones were "significantly impaired." In Bahrain, AWS said the damage "spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand."

AWS told customers to "recover from remote backups stored in other regions." The practical step is a recovery copy held in another Region. Before relying on a backup, note which Region holds it.

AWS's September 15 restoration limits cover data hosted exclusively in the affected Region or zone. A customer with a copy in another Region could restore from that copy.

Other Data Centers Hit by Drones

The Register reported on October 12, 2026 that Ukrainian drones struck three of Yandex's five Russian data centers. The strikes hit Sasovo overnight on October 7 to 8, 2026, Kaluga on October 9, and Vladimir on October 11. The Vladimir site supports Yandex Pay.

Meduza reported on October 9 that Yandex said "several modules of the data center have been completely disabled" at Kaluga. The Sasovo strike caused a fire but injured no one. Websites that use Yandex's infrastructure were among the services affected.

Yandex Cloud said: "The Yandex Cloud platform is still operating in a limited mode." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the drone attacks responded to Russian strikes on data centers in Kyiv.

According to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as reported by The Register, Russian drone strikes in September 2026 hit a Kyiv business center. The strikes killed four people, damaged a data center, and left about 100,000 households without internet.

What the Strikes Mean for People and Places Near Data Centers

In 2026, drones struck data centers in two conflicts: in the UAE and Bahrain after the joint US and Israeli attack on Iran, and in Russia and Kyiv.

The AWS posts report no injuries. The Kyiv business center strike killed four people, according to the BBC as reported by The Register.

For what living near a data center involves day to day, read living near a data center.

Yes, an Amazon data center was struck in 2026, and AWS's March 2 update attributes the damage to drone strikes. AWS has not named an attacker. On September 15, AWS said it cannot restore data hosted exclusively in the Bahrain Region or in UAE zone mec1-az2. The account rests on AWS Health Dashboard posts dated March 1, March 2, April 30 and September 15, 2026, on Reuters reporting carried by Al Jazeera, and on The Register. Three things would change it: AWS's promised update on Bahrain in early 2027, a restoration update for the UAE, or an AWS statement that names the attacker. For the current status of the Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, check the AWS Health Dashboard.