The world is still reeling from the USA and Israel's attacks on Iran, with the codenamed Operation Roaring Lion (by Israel) and Operation Epic Fury (by the USA) taking out key government officials that include the second supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei.
Things have rumbled on since 2025's 12-day war, with the USA again warning that Iran needed to surrender its nuclear program or face consequences. President Donald Trump has sparked fears that we're closer than ever to World War III, especially after Iran retaliated with drone and ballistic missile strikes in the Persian Gulf. As well as targeting Israel, Iran has marked US military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
There have been scenes of devastation in Dubai, with the Fairmont The Palm hotel being set ablaze and other civilian areas affected. In the aftermath of Iran's supposed strikes on international airports in Kuwait and the UAE, Amazon has spoken out after one of its data centers was potentially caught in the crossfire.
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As reported by Reuters, an Amazon Web Services data center in the USA was "impacted by objects that struck" it. This resulted in "sparks and fire," as well as a complete shutdown of the center while local emergency services dealt with the situation.
AWS hasn’t confirmed or denied whether this was in relation to Iran's retaliation, although Reuters notes that if it's confirmed, this is the first time a major US tech company has had one of its data centers knocked out by military action.
As we saw from the recent AWS outage in October 2025, everything from Fortnite to WhatsApp can be affected by AWS issues.
Amazon's update page reiterates that it's currently suffering from issues with two impaired Availability Zones in the UAE region, and although it's designed to deal with a total loss of one Availability Zone, error rates have increased as a second was affected. Still working toward a fix, Amazon concluded: "As soon as practically possible, we will begin the restoration of our two Availability Zones which will include a careful assessment of data health and any repair of storage if necessary."
Elsewhere, Amazon confirmed a localised power issue at an Availability Zone in Bahrain, but again, was careful not to clarify whether this was related to Iran's retaliation.
For now, customers are told to shift operations and rely on services from other regions as a full recovery is yet to be completed.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies already warned about a reliance on the UAE in terms of tech, stating: "In previous conflicts, regional adversaries such as Iran and its proxies targeted pipelines, refineries, and oil fields in Gulf partner states.
"In the compute era, these actors could also target data centers, energy infrastructure supporting compute, and fiber chokepoints."