Iran Targets Amazon Web Services Data Centers in Middle East

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) launched a series of drone and missile strikes against Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain starting March 1, 2026. Two facilities in the UAE were directly hit, and a facility in Bahrain sustained physical impact and fires. These attacks resulted in structural damage, power failures, and water damage from fire suppression activities, rendering several availability zones "hard down" for an extended period.

These strikes were retaliatory actions following joint U.S. and Israeli operations that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The IRGC claimed the targets supported U.S. military and intelligence activities. The outages disrupted core services including EC2, S3, and DynamoDB, causing failures for regional banks like Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emirates NBD, as well as consumer platforms like Careem.

Throughout March and April, the conflict escalated with further drone activity in Bahrain and threats against other U.S. tech firms including Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The IRGC designated approximately 30 U.S. tech assets as "enemy technology infrastructure" and threatened the Stargate AI project in Abu Dhabi. In response, AWS urged customers to migrate workloads to regions in the U.S., Europe, or Asia-Pacific, warning that the Middle East operating environment remains unpredictable. Parallel military actions included a U.S.-Israeli missile strike on a Bank Sepah data center in Tehran and an Iranian attack on the U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet in Bahrain that killed 21 soldiers.