People walk past the Amazon Web Services (AWS) exhibit at the National Retail Federation (NRF) 2026: Retail’s Big Show on January 12, 2026 in New York City, USA.
Kylie Cooper | Reuters
Amazon The web service announced late Monday that two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks, causing the facilities to be shut down.
The incident occurred on Sunday morning, and the company posted on its AWS Health Dashboard at the time that an “object” crashed into its data center in the UAE, causing “sparks and fire.” AWS also said it was investigating power and connectivity issues at its Bahrain site.
The company released its latest update at 7:19 p.m. ET, acknowledging that the outage was caused by a drone attack related to “the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.”
“Two of our facilities received direct hits in the UAE, and a drone attack in close proximity to one of our facilities in Bahrain physically impacted our infrastructure,” AWS said in a statement. “These attacks caused damage to structures, disrupted power supplies to infrastructure, required firefighting operations in some cases, and caused further flooding.”
The company’s popular EC2 service, which provides virtual server capacity, S3 storage service, and DynamoDB database service, were among several applications that experienced “increased error rates and reduced availability” as a result of the incident.
AWS said it is working to quickly restore service in the region, but expects recovery to be lengthy “given the nature of the physical damage.” The company said it would share an update on the situation by midnight if new information becomes available.
AWS said that while it repairs physical damage to its data centers, it is also working to restore data access and service availability in affected regions that do not require facilities to be fully brought back online.
AWS warned that instability in the Middle East is likely to continue, making business operations “unpredictable.”
Customers with workloads in the region should consider steps to reduce the impact of the conflict, such as backing up data or migrating workloads to other AWS Regions.
Amazon warned customers early Monday that deliveries would be delayed in the Middle East as Iran targets the region with missiles and drones in response to attacks by the United States and Israel.
It added a notice at the top of markets in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates warning customers about “extended delivery times in your area.”
