At approximately 4:30pm Dubai time on Sunday, unidentified objects struck an Amazon Web Services data centre in the UAE, creating what AWS described as "sparks and fire" and prompting emergency services to cut power to the facility and its backup generators.
The outage knocked cloud services offline for businesses across the Gulf, and by Monday morning it had spread to a second AWS cluster in the UAE and parts of its Bahrain infrastructure, with AWS warning that full recovery would require at least a day.
AWS has not confirmed what hit the building. The fire broke out on the same day Iran launched retaliatory missile and drone strikes across the Gulf after US and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the UAE Defence Ministry confirmed it intercepted more than 700 projectiles over the weekend.
If the data centre was hit by conflict-related debris, it would mark the first time a major US cloud provider's physical infrastructure has been knocked offline by military action.
Sarwa, the Abu Dhabi-based investment platform, emailed customers to say it was experiencing "a temporary service disruption due to reported issues affecting multiple services within Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) UAE region." Fractional real estate investment platform Stake and Liv by Emirates NBD also have reported outages.
Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, the UAE's third-largest lender, said its mobile app and contact centre were temporarily unavailable due to a "region-wide IT disruption." The Capital Markets Authority separately suspended trading on both the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and the Dubai Financial Market until at least Wednesday.
An email sent to Sarwa customers on Mon 2nd March
AWS designs its regions so that if one cluster fails, traffic shifts to another automatically, but when two clusters went down in the UAE and Bahrain had its own problems on the same day, the company ended up advising customers to move operations to entirely different parts of the world, which is not how the system is supposed to work.
The strike landed five days after CSIS published a commentary arguing that as AI infrastructure proliferates in the Gulf, adversaries "could also target data centres, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fibre chokepoints," citing the 2019 Houthi strikes on Saudi Aramco as a precedent.
The UAE opened its AWS region in 2022 specifically to let regulated industries keep data onshore while running on global infrastructure, exactly the promise that made it attractive to companies like Sarwa and the banks that went down on Sunday.
