AWS Data Centres in UAE, Bahrain Hit by Iranian Drone Attacks

Amazon said on Monday that several data centres operated by its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have suffered significant damage following Iranian drone attacks targeting parts of the Gulf.

In a company report cited by Reuters, Amazon confirmed that the strikes disrupted some of its cloud services and warned that recovery may take longer than usual. For startups across the region that rely on AWS to run everything from payment systems to customer dashboards, this is more than just a technical hiccup, it’s a serious operational headache.

According to an update published on AWS’s service status page, two of its facilities in the UAE were directly hit. In Bahrain, a drone strike landed near one of its sites, causing infrastructure damage. The company said the attacks led to structural harm and power outages across affected facilities. In certain cases, fire suppression systems were activated, which in turn caused additional water damage. A bit of a domino effect, really.

AWS stressed that teams are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible. That said, it cautioned that the scale and physical nature of the damage mean the recovery process could be prolonged.

The strikes come amid escalating tensions in the region. The targeting of logistics and critical infrastructure sites in the Gulf, including in the UAE and Bahrain, was described as retaliation for recent US and Israeli operations inside Iran. Those earlier strikes reportedly resulted in the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, last Saturday, a development that has sent shockwaves through regional politics and global markets alike.

For founders in MENA, this situation lands close to home. I remember speaking to an early-stage startup in Dubai last year that proudly told me they had “everything on AWS”, from backups to analytics. It felt spot on at the time; cloud infrastructure is usually seen as resilient and decentralised. But moments like this are a reminder that even the most robust systems are not immune to geopolitical tremors.

On the flip side, the incident may push more companies to rethink redundancy strategies. Multi-region backups, hybrid cloud models, disaster recovery drills, these topics can feel like a faff when you’re chasing growth. Yet they suddenly become mission-critical when the unexpected happens.

I’m not a fan of alarmism, and it’s definately too early to predict the long-term fallout. Still, for a region that has worked hard to position itself as a stable tech hub, events like this test that narrative. Investors and entrepreneurs alike will be watching closely.

For now, AWS says restoration efforts are ongoing. And startups across the Gulf? They’ll be refreshing their dashboards, hoping services come fully back online sooner rather than later.

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