On 1 March 2026, Iranian forces launched drone strikes against Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, coinciding with the first day of intensified regional hostilities following US and Zionist strikes that eliminated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
These operations damaged three facilities: two in the UAE suffered direct hits, igniting fires and forcing power shutdowns, while a Bahrain site sustained structural impact from a nearby drone explosion. AWS confirmed the incidents, noting structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and water-related issues from fire suppression activities, leading to prolonged recovery for affected services.
The strikes triggered widespread outages across banking, payment systems, delivery platforms, and enterprise software throughout the region. Specific impacts included downtime for apps like Uber, Careem, and local banking platforms such as those from Emirates NBD and Bahrain Islamic Bank, with core AWS services like EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and RDS experiencing degraded performance or temporary halts, as Fortune details. AWS advised clients to migrate workloads away from the impacted zones (ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 regions), highlighting the cascading effects on Gulf economies heavily reliant on cloud computing.
Analysts view this as a watershed in modern conflict, where commercial data centres transition from civilian assets to strategic military targets due to their role in hosting dual-use AI and intelligence workloads, as Fortune reports. The US military utilises AWS for certain operations, including running Anthropic’s Claude model for intelligence tasks, raising questions about the facilities' dual civilian-military nature. AWS stated in its status update, as Reuters reports: “In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impact to our infrastructure”.
No fatalities occurred, as multiple reports confirm, but the psychological and economic ripple effects proved significant, exposing vulnerabilities in air defence coverage for critical infrastructure.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility through state-affiliated channels, framing the strikes as measured responses to perceived threats. Fars News Agency reported via Telegram that the Bahrain facility was specifically chosen “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities”. (more...)
Iran Strikes Data Centres: Escalating Cyber Warfare and Corporate Complicity in Zionist/US attack
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