Retaliatory Iranian drone and missile attacks across the Gulf have knocked out Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, triggered an emergency Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit and caused deaths and widespread damage, bringing the US-Iran conflict home to global digital infrastructure.
The US-Iran war escalated sharply on Monday as Iran launched sweeping retaliatory strikes across the Gulf, targeting airports, seaports, and residential areas in response to joint US-Israeli military attacks on Iranian soil. The fallout has now spread beyond physical infrastructure to the digital realm, with AWS confirming that its cloud data centres in both the UAE and Bahrain have been hit by power outages and connectivity failures amid the broader regional chaos.
At around 4:30am PST (Pacific Standard Time) on Sunday, one of AWS's availability zones in the UAE, designated mec1-az2, was struck by projectiles that sparked a fire inside the facility. AWS uses the term 'availability zone' to describe a cluster of one or more physically separate data centres within a single region, designed to be isolated from failures in other availability zones. Fire crews responding to the blaze cut power to the affected zone to safely extinguish the flames, AWS confirmed on its status page.
By Monday, a second availability zone in the UAE had also lost power. AWS says it is dealing with what it described as a 'localised power issue' in the second zone, while simultaneously investigating 'additional connectivity issues and error rates' across the region.
The company advised customers to redirect their workloads to AWS infrastructure in other geographic regions, warning that full recovery is still 'multiple hours away'.
AWS also reported a localised power disruption at one of its data centres in Bahrain, though it offered no explanation for that outage and did not respond to media requests for comment on whether it was connected to Iranian strikes.
The company has notably declined to confirm or deny any direct link between the UAE data centre damage and the Iranian military action despite the timing and the acknowledgement that foreign objects struck the facility.
Meanwhile, the broader impact of the Iranian strikes on the UAE has been severe. Missiles and drones struck airports, seaports and densely populated residential districts across the country. In Dubai, a five-star resort caught fire and the city's iconic skyline, home to the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, came under direct threat. Dubai International Airport, one of the world's busiest, reported structural damage, leading to the cancellation of around 70% of its scheduled flights.
In Abu Dhabi, a strike on the international airport killed one person and left seven others injured. Airlines including Air India, IndiGo, British Airways, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic and Cathay Pacific suspended all services to the region as the situation deteriorated.
In a sign of the gravity of the crisis, the six-member GCC comprising the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait--convened an emergency video conference on Sunday to coordinate a unified response.
The council issued a strongly worded statement pledging to take 'all necessary measures' to defend the security of its member states, protect their citizens, and safeguard their territorial integrity. It explicitly kept open the option of 'responding to the aggression' if Iranian attacks continued, while also calling for their 'immediate cessation'.
The GCC underscored that stability across the Gulf region was indispensable to global economic security--a pointed reference to the region's role as a supplier of nearly a fifth of the world's oil.
The damage to AWS's UAE data centres marks a significant and sobering development in the conflict: for the first time, a major global cloud infrastructure provider has been physically struck in an active war zone, raising urgent questions about the vulnerability of digital infrastructure to geopolitical conflict.
AWS operates some of the world's most critical cloud computing infrastructure, supporting thousands of businesses, governments, and institutions across the Middle East and globally. An extended outage in its UAE and Bahrain regions could disrupt financial services, government platforms, e-commerce operations, and communications networks across the region.
While AWS has built redundancy into its architecture through multiple availability zones and regions, a simultaneous outage across two zones in the UAE, combined with disruption in Bahrain, tests the limits of that resilience. The company's advice to customers to shift to alternate regions suggests the situation remains far from stable.
Iran's retaliatory campaign has been described by military analysts as the most expansive strike operation the country has undertaken against Gulf Arab states. Alongside the UAE and Bahrain, Iranian drones and missiles reportedly targeted US military installations in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The Yemen-based Houthi movement, aligned with Tehran, also declared the resumption of attacks on Red Sea shipping.
As emergency response teams worked to restore power and connectivity across the Gulf, the broader question hanging over global markets and governments was how long the conflict would last and whether the region's interconnected physical and digital infrastructure could withstand a prolonged exchange of fire.
AWS has said it will provide further updates as recovery efforts progress. For now, businesses and governments relying on its Middle East cloud infrastructure have been left scrambling for alternatives.
