One of Amazon’s cloud data centers in the United Arab Emirates was temporarily taken offline after it was hit by unidentified objects amid Iranian strikes in the region.
AWS said the items triggered sparks and a resulting fire at the facility on Sunday (March 1).
The disruption began at about 4.30 am PST and impacted one Availability Zone, identified as mec1-az2.
According to Amazon Web Services, emergency responders attended the site and the local fire department cut electricity to the building while crews worked to put out the blaze.
The outage caused connectivity issues within the affected zone, and AWS warned it could take several hours before services are fully restored there.
AWS added that the rest of its Availability Zones in the UAE region continued running as normal, helping to reduce knock-on effects for customers.
AWS explains that an Availability Zone is made up of one or more physical data centers that are clustered together but kept separate from other zones in the same region to help prevent a single issue from causing wider outages.
The incident comes at a time of escalating regional tension.
When Reuters asked whether the data center disruption was tied to the strikes, AWS declined to say whether there was any connection.
Iran strikes: what you need to know
US President Donald Trump said on Saturday (28 February) that the US and Israel had begun ‘major combat operations’ in Iran after explosions were reported in several cities.
After weeks of increased US military presence in the area, Trump said in a Truth Social video that ‘we are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground’.
Trump said the purpose of the strikes was to ‘ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon’.
Separately, referring to Israel’s retaliatory action, the country’s defence minister said the objective was to ‘remove threats against the State of Israel’.
The latest developments follow weeks of Trump warning of potential military action if Iran did not agree to a fresh agreement over its nuclear programme, while Iran has repeatedly maintained that its nuclear work is ‘entirely peaceful’.
In response to the US and Israeli strikes, Iran has launched strikes of its own on Israel and Gulf Arab nations, including Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait.
The BBC reports that at least nine people died after a strike hit the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh. It also said military and civilian sites were targeted over the weekend, including an American naval base in Bahrain and Dubai’s international airport in the United Arab Emirates.
Footage posted online by tourists and residents appears to show damage in a number of locations following missile and drone attacks, with reports also claiming that several British citizens are currently unable to leave Dubai.