An Amazon Web Services data center in the United Arab Emirates was struck by unidentified objects on Sunday evening, igniting a fire that knocked out power to the facility and disrupted cloud services across the region. It appears to be the first confirmed instance of the Iran conflict causing direct physical damage to Western technology infrastructure.
AWS said the incident took place around 4:30 p.m. Dubai time on Sunday, impacting services from the data center in one of its regional availability groups. Power to the facility was shut off by the fire department as they worked to extinguish the blaze. The company declined to comment beyond its public status postings.
“One of our Availability Zones was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire,” the company said in a post about the UAE incident.
A subsequent update on Monday morning said a separate zone of data centers had been impacted by what AWS described as a localized power issue, and the company separately disclosed it was investigating connectivity and power disruptions in Bahrain.
The impacted availability zone was mec1-az2 in AWS’s me-central-1 UAE region as customers reported degraded access to compute resources. Today, AWS said it was routing traffic away from the affected facility and that other groups of data centers were not impacted by the fire itself.
AWS said it did not have an estimated time for when power would be restored to the affected data center. As of Monday morning, most services had been restored, though the affected availability zone remained under recovery and customers were advised to shift workloads to alternative zones or regions.
While it is unclear if the UAE incident is directly related to the conflict between the US and Iran, the fire broke out on the same day Iranian projectiles struck the country in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior officials. Iran’s retaliation has spread across the Middle East, with waves of missile and drone attacks launched against US bases and allies around the region, including in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
AWS has not confirmed whether the objects that struck the facility were munitions, drones, or debris, and has stopped short of describing the incident as an attack. AWS customers in the UAE include Al Ghurair Investment and Dubai Islamic Bank. The company operates 123 availability zones across 39 regions globally. The UAE region, launched in 2022, had been marketed as a stable gateway for cloud adoption across the Gulf, with significant uptake from financial institutions, government entities, and regional enterprises.
