Drone strikes damage AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain

2026-03-01 · Publisher : AWS · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

From 1 March 2026, drone strikes hit two AWS sites in the United Arab Emirates and damage one in Bahrain. Two of the three zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region are disrupted; AWS recommends failing over to other regions.

### What changes On 1 March 2026 around 4:30 am (Pacific time), availability zone **mec1-az2** of AWS region **ME-CENTRAL-1** (United Arab Emirates) was hit by "objects" that caused "sparks and fire" in a data center, according to AWS's first communications. On 2 March at 4:19 pm (Pacific time), AWS confirmed that **two of its sites in the UAE were directly struck** by drones, and that a site in region **ME-SOUTH-1** (Bahrain) was damaged by a strike nearby. AWS attributes the strikes to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. ### Key facts - Structural damage, disrupted power delivery and water damage from fire suppression systems disrupted two of the three zones of ME-CENTRAL-1 (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3); mec1-az1 remained partially operational. - Degraded services: EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch, RDS, as well as the management console and command line. A count published by the specialist press reports 109 services affected (25 disrupted, 34 degraded, 50 impacted). - AWS estimated it would take "at least a day" to fully restore power and connectivity, prioritizing staff safety. - Guidance to customers: immediately enact disaster recovery plans, restore from backups in other regions and redirect traffic out of ME-CENTRAL-1 to Europe, the United States or Asia-Pacific. ### Why it matters Cloud risk analyses cover software outages and the failure of a zone, rarely a physical attack on a data center. Here, two zones out of three were lost at the same time: multi-zone redundancy is not enough, and only a rehearsed cross-region recovery protects. For IT leaders, the event adds a geopolitical criterion to workload placement: where is the data, and what happens if an entire region becomes unreachable. ### Takeaway An armed conflict took two zones of a cloud region out of service: cross-region recovery is no longer a comfort option.

Tags : Incident, AWS, Datacenter, Hyperscaler