AWS data center drone strike incidents in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have disrupted cloud services, marking the first time military action has directly impacted a major U.S. tech company’s infrastructure.

Amazon said on Monday that some of its data centers in the UAE and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes linked to the escalating Middle East conflict. The company warned that recovery could be prolonged due to structural and power-related damage.

AWS Data Center Drone Strike Causes Structural and Power Damage

According to an update from Amazon Web Services (AWS) on its status page, two facilities in the UAE were directly struck. In Bahrain, a drone strike occurred in close proximity to one facility, causing physical impact to infrastructure.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said.

Earlier, AWS had described that “objects” triggered a fire on Sunday, forcing authorities to cut power to a cluster of Amazon data centers in the UAE. Restoration was expected to take at least a day.

The company said it is working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible but expects recovery to take time given the extent of the physical damage.

The AWS Middle East outage cloud services disrupted a dozen core services, and AWS advised customers to back up critical data and shift operations to unaffected regions.

A person with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters that financial institutions relying on AWS services were among those affected. The source requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Iran US Israel War Cloud Infrastructure Risk Highlighted

The strikes came after Iran fired a barrage of drones and missiles at Gulf states in retaliation for U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday.

The incident underscores growing Iran US Israel war cloud infrastructure risk concerns, as regional conflict intersects with digital infrastructure critical to global commerce.

AWS acknowledged that the broader operating environment remains uncertain. “Even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable,” the company said.

The disruption also raises questions about Big Tech’s expansion in the region. U.S. technology companies have increasingly positioned the UAE as a regional hub for artificial intelligence computing.

Microsoft said in November it plans to increase its total investment in the UAE to $15 billion by the end of 2029 and will use Nvidia chips in its data centers there.

Last week, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that in past conflicts, regional adversaries targeted pipelines, refineries and oil fields in Gulf states. In the compute era, it said, similar actors could target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute and fiber chokepoints.

Microsoft, Google and Oracle, which also operate facilities in the UAE, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said its platforms and mobile app were unavailable due to a region-wide IT disruption, though it did not directly link the outage to the AWS incident.

The AWS data center drone strike represents a significant escalation in how geopolitical conflict can directly affect cloud infrastructure, with ripple effects across financial services and enterprise operations in the region.