drone strikes knock out aws regions in the uae and bahrain
Drone strikes physically damaged AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain, impairing multiple Availability Zones; AWS later said data held only in one UAE zone, or only in the Bahrain Region, cannot be restored.
- regions
- ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain)
- root cause
- physical damage to facilities from drone strikes (AWS)
- services hit
- EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch, RDS, Management Console and CLI, among others
- status
- AWS said on 15 Sep 2026 that data held only in mec1-az2 (UAE) or only in ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) cannot be restored; it is replacing the affected UAE infrastructure
what happened
- AWS posted at 12:51 UTC on 1 March 2026 that it was investigating issues with AWS services in the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region.[1]
- AWS said the mec1-az2 Availability Zone 'was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire.'[1]
- On 3 March 2026, AWS said both affected Regions, UAE (ME-CENTRAL-1) and Bahrain (ME-SOUTH-1), had experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes.[1]
- Services AWS named with impact included EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch, RDS and the Management Console and CLI.[1]
- AWS said two of the three UAE Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) were impaired, and that S3 is designed to withstand the total loss of a single zone; with two zones down, customers saw high failure rates for data ingest and egress.[1,2]
- On 30 April 2026, AWS said relevant billing operations were suspended in both Regions while it restored normal operations, a process it expected to take several months.[1]
- On 15 September 2026, AWS said it was 'unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone.'[1]
- On 15 September 2026, AWS said damage in Bahrain spanned multiple Availability Zones and that it was unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the ME-SOUTH-1 Region.[1]
where sources differThe Register says power disruptions spread to mec1-az3 'by 1846 UTC'; AWS Health timestamps put AWS's first mec1-az3 post at 06:46 UTC on 2 March 2026.
sources2
- 01AWS Health Dashboard — current events (ME-CENTRAL-1 multiple-services operational issue) ↗ primaryAmazon Web Servicesaccessed 2026-10-21
- 02AWS says drones hit two of its datacenters in UAE, urges users to move resources to different regions ↗ secondaryThe Registeraccessed 2026-10-21