Amazon Web Services said its cloud facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain experienced power and connectivity disruptions on Monday after its UAE data centre was struck by “objects,” triggering a fire.
The company said two availability zones — clusters of data centres — in the UAE region were without power. On Sunday, AWS disclosed that one zone had been affected after “objects” struck the facility, causing sparks and a fire that led to a shutdown of power as a precaution.
“We can confirm that a localized power issue has affected another availability zone” in the UAE region, AWS said on its status page.
The outages also impacted AWS’s Bahrain region, with the company citing localized power issues affecting services in both locations. AWS initially reported partial recovery in the UAE on Monday but later advised customers to rely on services in other regions while restoration efforts continued.
The company said full recovery in both the UAE and Bahrain regions was expected to take “many hours.”
AWS did not confirm whether the incident was linked to ongoing regional tensions following Iranian strikes on Gulf states, including the UAE and Bahrain, in response to U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran.
Separately, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said technical issues were affecting some of its platforms and mobile app users on Monday. It was not immediately clear whether the bank’s disruptions were related to the AWS outage.
The incident underscores the vulnerability of critical cloud infrastructure in geopolitically sensitive regions, particularly as businesses and governments increasingly rely on centralized data centre networks for essential services.
