Iranian missiles have reportedly smashed into Amazon Web Services data centers across the Gulf, knocking critical cloud infrastructure offline and forcing AWS to tell customers to “failover to other regions.”
The first hit came Sunday when “objects”—widely believed to be Iranian drones or missiles—struck an AWS facility in the UAE. The impact sparked a fire that forced firefighters to cut power to the entire building. The mec1-az2 zone in Dubai went dark around 4:30 a.m. local time.
Twelve hours later, a second AWS zone in the UAE lost power. Then Bahrain got hit. AWS admitted it faced “localized power issues” at multiple Gulf facilities and officially advised customers to stop relying on Middle East infrastructure.
“We recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions,” the company wrote on its status page. Translation: your data isn’t safe here right now.
The timing is brutal. Iran is hammering US allies across the Gulf after American and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday. Dubai airport, luxury hotels, and residential areas have all taken damage.
AWS hasn’t confirmed the strikes were deliberate attacks. But experts aren’t buying the “localized power issue” spin. “Assuming this was an Iranian drone strike, it is the first time a commercial data center was physically targeted in a conflict,” tweeted Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It won’t be the last.”
The fallout is massive. AWS hosts everything from Netflix to government systems. Anthropic—the company behind AI chatbot Claude—runs on Amazon’s cloud. Some online speculation claims Claude was used in military planning for the Iran strikes, though this remains unverified.
What is confirmed: multiple AWS zones are down, recovery is “multiple hours away,” and the world’s biggest cloud provider just admitted it can’t protect Gulf infrastructure during a shooting war.
For businesses, it’s a nightmare. For Iran, it’s a message: nowhere is safe.
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