March 2 - Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported on Monday that several of its data centre zones in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were experiencing power and connectivity problems amid a wider region under attack by Iranian retaliatory strikes, which have struck airports, ports, and residential areas across the Gulf.
According to AWS's status updates, two availability zones in the UAE were without power on Monday. The cloud provider said one of those UAE zones had been affected after "objects" struck the data center, creating sparks and fire; power was subsequently shut off. AWS added: "We can confirm that a localized power issue has affected another availability zone" in the UAE region.
Earlier on Monday the company reported partial recovery in the region, but later advised customers to migrate workloads to services hosted in other AWS regions while it worked toward restoration. AWS warned that recovery was expected to be "multiple hours away."
Separately, the company reported a localized power issue at a zone in Bahrain. When asked earlier about whether the UAE incident was connected to the Iranian strikes, the company did not confirm or deny a connection.
The outages affected clusters of data centres - known as availability zones - rather than the global service footprint, and AWS's public status notes drove the guidance to rely on other regions while recovery operations continued. The company's updates emphasized localized impacts and an ongoing timeline for repair and service restoration.
Operational context
For cloud customers with infrastructure or services routed through the affected UAE and Bahrain zones, AWS's status advisories recommended shifting critical workloads to regions not experiencing issues. The company did not provide additional technical details beyond the account of objects striking the UAE facility and the localized power problems.
All factual details in this report reflect the information AWS published on its status page and the company's response to inquiries about the possible link between the data centre incidents and the wider regional strikes.