Iran’s retaliatory attack ramped up on Sunday after the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday morning. Follow-on strikes were reported in Israel, across multiple Gulf states, and maritime incidents affected commercial shipping lanes in and around the Strait of Hormuz.
One notable and unexpected point of disruption has emerged in the Middle East critical infrastructure on Sunday morning, with Amazon reporting that its Middle East (UAE) data center region has experienced a power issue that degraded internet connectivity and impaired cloud service availability.
AWS reported that its ME-CENTRAL-1 Region (mec1-az2), which refers to a specific cluster of AWS data-center infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates, is experiencing operational issues due to a “localized power issue.” AWS stated that the severity of the incident is “degraded.”
“Other AWS Services are also experiencing error rates and latencies for some workflows. We have weighed away traffic for most services at this time. We recommend customers utilize one of the other Availability Zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region at this time, as existing instances in other AZ’s remain unaffected by this issue,” AWS wrote on its status page, adding, “We are actively working to restore power and connectivity, at which time we will begin to work to recover affected resources. As of this time, we expect recovery is multiple hours away.”
UAE Data Center Map
Data Cables Map
The AWS status report made no mention of whether the power disruptions were due to Iranian missile or drone strikes on UAE critical infrastructure, such as transmission lines or power generation facilities.
Earlier, the UAE Ministry of Defense announced that the “country was subjected today to a blatant attack by Iranian ballistic missiles, which was dealt with by the UAE air defenses with high efficiency, and a number of missiles were successfully intercepted.”
BREAKING:
The air defense systems of the UAE are countering Iran’s air attack against the Emirates tonight pic.twitter.com/Hui0VESXFF
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) March 1, 2026
Beyond the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, and Israel have been subjected to Iranian retaliatory attacks – this is mostly because US military installations are in these countries.
Qatar’s Ministry of Defense issued a statement saying: “The State of Qatar expresses its strong condemnation of the targeting of Qatari territory with Iranian ballistic missiles.”
The UAE has confirmed a temporary closure of its airspace as an “exceptional precautionary measure.”
One key question is whether the conflict is now spilling beyond military targets and into civilian critical infrastructure. If that line has already been crossed, U.S. hyperscalers expanding in the UAE, including Microsoft, whose commitment totals about $15.2 billion and includes significant AI and cloud datacenter spending, may need to be reassessed given the fiery geopolitical climate.
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