AWS Disruptions in UAE, Bahrain from Iranian Strikes

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, reported connectivity disruptions at data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1, 2026, as Iranian missile and drone strikes targeted Gulf states in retaliation for recent U.S. and Israeli military actions against Iran.

In the UAE, one of AWS's availability zones in the me-central-1 region, specifically mec1-az2, experienced a power outage after unidentified objects struck the facility around 4:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The impact caused sparks and ignited a fire, prompting firefighters to shut off power to the data center and its generators while extinguishing the blaze, according to AWS's service health dashboard. Availability zones, which consist of one or more isolated data centers designed for resilience, are engineered to operate independently, allowing workloads to shift to unaffected zones. AWS stated that restoration efforts would take several hours and confirmed that other zones in the UAE region remained operational. By late Sunday, the company noted partial recovery for some systems but advised customers to redirect workloads to alternative availability zones or other AWS regions to...