Drone strikes on Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates have disrupted banks, payments platforms and consumer apps across the region, prompting renewed debate about the resilience of centralised cloud infrastructure during geopolitical conflict.
AWS confirmed that two of its UAE data centres and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, taking them offline. The company said the incidents caused structural damage and disrupted power delivery, with fire suppression measures leading to additional water damage in some facilities.
The escalation followed joint military action by the United States and Israel against Iran over the weekend, which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and triggered retaliatory strikes across the region. Military bases and critical infrastructure, including data centres and energy assets, have reportedly been targeted.
In the UAE, digital services were quickly affected. Careem reported outages, while payments firms Alaan and Hubpay flagged service interruptions. ADCB and Emirates NBD said aspects of their banking services were temporarily unavailable. Snowflake also reported elevated connectivity issues within the region.
AWS said recovery efforts were ongoing and urged customers running workloads in the Middle East to migrate to alternative AWS regions where possible.
Reacting to the events, Dominic Williams said the outage confirms a trend he has long warned about.
“AWS outage in the UAE is proving what I’ve been predicting for years. Data centres are the new targets in conflict, including for terrorists in the future,” Dom said.
He added that decentralised infrastructure offers a different model. “ICP provides a way to create sovereign cloud from a network that can withstand data centre losses,” he said, arguing that distributed systems reduce reliance on single physical locations that can be disabled during conflict.
Cloud providers generally build redundancy into their systems, distributing data across multiple regions to limit the impact of localised failures. However, the UAE incident illustrates how physical attacks on infrastructure can still create disruption when services are concentrated within a specific geography.
The wider geopolitical tensions have also unsettled markets. Oil prices rose after Iran moved to close the Strait of Hormuz, while stock markets in the United States, Europe and Asia opened lower amid concerns over regional stability and energy supply.
For technology observers within the blockchain and decentralised computing space, the strikes have sharpened an ongoing argument about whether future digital infrastructure should rely less on centralised data centres and more on globally distributed networks designed to remain operational even if individual facilities are lost.
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