In a rare and dramatic physical disruption to global cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed that one of its major data centers in the United Arab Emirates was hit by unidentified “objects” in the early hours of Sunday, March 1, 2026. The impact triggered sparks and a fire, leading to a cascading service outage that has affected businesses across the Middle East.
The timeline of the strike
According to official statements from Amazon, the incident occurred at approximately 4:30 AM PST (12:30 GMT) on Sunday. The “objects” struck a facility within the mec1-az2 Availability Zone, a critical cluster of data centers in the UAE.
“The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire,” AWS stated on its health dashboard. This preventative measure effectively knocked the entire zone offline. By Monday morning, March 2, AWS reported that a second Availability Zone in the UAE was also facing “localized power issues,” further complicating recovery efforts.
Retaliatory strikes in the gulf
While Amazon has officially used the vague term “objects” and declined to confirm or deny a link to regional conflict, the incident coincides with a massive escalation in Middle East tensions.
Over the weekend, Iran launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes across the Gulf including the UAE and Bahrain following US and Israeli military actions. Reports indicate that UAE air defenses intercepted hundreds of projectiles, but some drones reportedly struck civilian and industrial targets. This marks one of the first instances in modern history where a major commercial data center has been physically impacted during a state-level military conflict.
Widespread service impact
The outage has not been limited to the UAE. AWS confirmed that its Bahrain region (ME-SOUTH-1) also experienced power and connectivity issues on Monday.
Impacted Services, ozens of core services including Amazon EC2, S3 (Storage), RDS (Databases), and AWS Lambda experienced significant error rates and latencies.
Business Disruption, Major regional entities, including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, reported technical issues with their mobile apps and platforms, though it has not been officially confirmed if these were directly caused by the AWS outage.
Advice to Customers, AWS has urged clients to “backup any critical data to another AWS Region” and to failover workloads to unaffected zones, though it warned that a “full recovery is still expected to be many hours away.”
Security and resilience in a war zone
The physical vulnerability of the “cloud” has rarely been so visible. While AWS is designed for high availability with multiple “Availability Zones” meant to act as backups for one another; the scale of the regional conflict has put this redundancy to the test.
As of Monday evening, local time, emergency crews and AWS engineers are still awaiting full permission to restore power to the primary impacted site. For global tech giants, the incident raises a sobering new reality: in the age of drone warfare, even the digital backbone of the economy is on the front lines.