Iranian Drone Strikes Disrupt AWS Data Centers in UAE and Bahrain

On March 1, 2026, Iranian drone strikes damaged three Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, resulting in outages across several core services in the region.

This incident is notable as the first confirmed military attack on the infrastructure of a hyperscale cloud provider, affecting platforms that support banking, payments, and ride-sharing services.

AWS confirmed through its health dashboard that two facilities in the UAE were directly hit, while a third in Bahrain sustained damage from debris, leading to structural issues, power disruptions, and water damage from fire suppression systems.

According to a statement from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Bahrain data center was targeted because it hosts U.S. military workloads. The strikes caused interruptions to Amazon services that persisted in both the UAE and Bahrain for at least ten days after the event.

What the numbers show

• Three AWS data centers were damaged on March 1, 2026
• Nearly 30 technology infrastructure sites were listed as targets by Iran’s Tasnim news agency
• Amazon services in the UAE and Bahrain remained disrupted as of March 11, 2026

Iran’s state-affiliated Tasnim news agency published a list naming almost 30 technology infrastructure locations, including data centers and offices of major companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, and the UAE, and declared them as legitimate targets.

Analysts have described these attacks as among the first known physical strikes on data centers, which are critical for operating cloud services and artificial intelligence platforms. The attacks resulted in outages that affected multiple sectors, including banking and transportation applications.

The U.S. military acknowledged the use of artificial intelligence tools to assist in selecting targets in Iran, with human personnel maintaining final decision authority. Rep. Pat Harrigan stated that AI was used to process large volumes of data, enabling over 2,000 targets to be struck with precision during Operation Epic Fury.

Experts have identified data centers as essential infrastructure for artificial intelligence capabilities and have stated that these facilities may become more frequent targets in future conflicts.

* This article is based on publicly available information at the time of writing.