Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that drone strikes physically damaged three of its data centers in the Middle East on March 1, 2026. This unprecedented event marks the first time a major cloud provider’s physical infrastructure has been taken offline by military action.

The Damage Report

• Targeted Regions: The strikes hit two facilities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and one in Bahrain.
• Physical Impact: According to reports on Data Center Dynamics, the strikes caused structural fires and triggered internal suppression systems. In the UAE, server rooms were flooded with several centimeters of water, knocking out multiple server racks.
• Conflict Context: The attacks are linked to a series of retaliatory launches by Iran against Gulf states, as detailed by The Register.

Service Disruptions

The damage primarily impacted the ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 regions. Users experienced significant downtime for:

• Compute & Storage: Major issues with Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.
• Downstream Effects: Localized outages hit regional banks, airports, and third-party platforms like Snowflake.

Recovery Status

AWS is currently attempting to reroute traffic and restore data via software-based recovery paths, but they have warned that physical repairs will take considerable time. Customers are advised to check the AWS Service Health Dashboard for real-time updates and migrate critical workloads to unaffected global regions.