A significant service disruption has hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Middle East following drone strikes that caused physical damage to data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. The incident, tied directly to escalating military conflict in the region, began on Sunday, March 1, 2026, when external objects struck facilities in the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) regions.
AWS confirmed that two facilities in the UAE were "directly struck," while a site in Bahrain was taken offline after a nearby strike caused infrastructure damage. The impacts caused sparks and a fire, leading local fire departments to order a total power shutdown, including backup generators, to safely extinguish the flames. AWS stated the strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.
The technical fallout is severe. While Amazon S3 is designed to survive the loss of a single availability zone, the simultaneous failure of two zones—specifically mec1-az2 and mec1-az3—has led to "high failure rates for data ingest and egress." Key services including EC2 (virtual servers), S3 (object storage), and DynamoDB (NoSQL database) are reporting elevated error rates and degraded availability. Lambda, Kinesis, and CloudWatch services also remain degraded. AWS has partially restored its Management Console, but some pages still return errors.
The disruption has a broad customer impact, affecting major technological infrastructure that routes global traffic through these regions. Services like Claude (by Anthropic) and ChatGPT, which depend heavily on AWS GPU Clusters and API networking, have experienced significant network disruption. AWS is advising customers to move their data and applications to alternate regions in the U.S., Europe, or Asia Pacific, warning that ongoing instability could make regional operations "unpredictable."
Recovery is expected to be "prolonged" due to the physical nature of the damage. AWS must wait for formal permission from fire officials to re-energize buildings, followed by a "careful assessment of data health" due to risks of hardware damage from the abrupt, fire-related shutdown. The company's retail operations in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE are also affected, with warnings of "extended delivery time."
The market reaction has been pronounced. Amazon (AMZN) stock fell over 2% in pre-market trading following the news. Geopolitical uncertainty triggered a surge in oil prices and a 2% jump in gold. Asian markets reacted severely, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropping 2.05% and Japan’s Nikkei falling 1.53%. In contrast, cryptocurrency markets showed resilience. As US markets opened, Bitcoin rose about 4% to nearly $68,500, with Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and Ripple (XRP) all posting gains over 3% in the same period.
