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Amazon (AMZN) Stock Slides as Drone Attacks Damage AWS Facilities in Middle East

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AMZN Stock Card

Key Takeaways

  • Drone strikes directly impacted two AWS facilities in the UAE, with a third location in Bahrain suffering collateral damage.
  • Critical cloud services like EC2, S3, and DynamoDB reported increased error rates and reduced performance.
  • While AWS has brought the Management Console partially back online, full recovery is expected to take considerable time due to infrastructure damage.
  • Customers received guidance from Amazon to shift their operations to alternative AWS regions across the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific.
  • Shares of AMZN declined more than 2% during Tuesday’s pre-market session after the incident was disclosed.

Amazon (AMZN) shares experienced a decline exceeding 2% in pre-market hours on Tuesday after Amazon Web Services disclosed that military drone attacks connected to escalating Middle East tensions had inflicted damage on its infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain.


AMZN Stock Card
Amazon.com, Inc., AMZN

The attacks occurred early Sunday morning according to local time zones. AWS initially communicated through its health status dashboard that unidentified “objects” had impacted UAE-based facilities, resulting in “sparks and fire.”

Later on Monday evening, AWS provided more detailed information. Two facilities located in the UAE sustained “direct strikes,” while a third installation in Bahrain went offline following a nearby strike that caused substantial physical infrastructure damage.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in a statement.

The resulting damage caused significant disruptions to multiple critical services within the affected geographic zones. EC2 compute instances, S3 storage solutions, and DynamoDB — AWS’s managed NoSQL database platform — all experienced higher-than-normal error rates and diminished performance.

According to AWS, DynamoDB error rates “remain elevated” with no “meaningful improvement” observed as of their latest update. Additional services including Lambda, Kinesis, and CloudWatch also “remain degraded.”

One bright spot: AWS successfully brought its Management Console back to partial functionality, allowing customers to access the web-based interface for managing their cloud resources. However, the restoration remains incomplete, with certain console pages continuing to generate error responses.

Extended Recovery Expected

AWS indicated that the recovery process will be “prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved.” Engineering teams continue to evaluate the complete scope of infrastructure damage while making worker safety their top priority.

The cloud provider noted that certain data retrieval capabilities and service functionality can be brought back online without requiring complete facility restoration — and those efforts are currently in progress.

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AWS holds the position as the global leader in cloud infrastructure services, meaning that even geographically limited outages can affect a substantial customer base.

The tech giant recommended that customers operating workloads in Middle Eastern regions implement data backup procedures and evaluate migrating their resources to alternative AWS regions spanning the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific territories.

AWS also cautioned that the continuing instability throughout the Middle East region could lead to “unpredictable” operational conditions in the foreseeable future.

Effects on Amazon’s Broader Operations

The disruption extended beyond cloud infrastructure to impact Amazon’s e-commerce operations throughout the region. The company posted advisory notices across its online marketplaces in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE alerting customers to expect “extended delivery time in your area.”

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The drone attacks coincided with Iran’s launch of missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles targeting Israel and facilities associated with U.S. interests throughout the Gulf region, representing retaliation for coordinated U.S.-Israeli military operations against Iranian positions.

Amazon acknowledged the connection between the service disruptions and the regional military conflict in its Monday evening communication — marking the first official confirmation linking the infrastructure damage to the geopolitical escalation.

According to the most recent status update, conditions at the UAE-based facility “remain largely unchanged,” with technical teams continuing efforts to achieve complete infrastructure restoration.

Financial analysts on Wall Street continue to rate AMZN as a Strong Buy, with 40 Buy recommendations and 3 Hold ratings issued over the preceding three-month period. The consensus price target stands at $282.21, suggesting approximately 35% potential upside from present trading levels.

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Crypto World

Visa and Stripe’s Bridge Expand Global Stablecoin Card Program

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Visa and Stripe's Bridge Expand Global Stablecoin Card Program

Global payment giant Visa is expanding its stablecoin card partnership with Stripe-owned Bridge, expanding the rollout of stablecoin-linked Visa cards worldwide and testing onchain settlement.

Visa and Bridge are expanding their joint card program to 18 countries, with plans to reach more than 100 across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East by the end of the year, according to a Tuesday announcement.

The expansion follows the program’s initial launch in April 2025, which first supported markets in Latin America, including Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Chile.

In addition to the expansion, the companies are testing stablecoin settlement through Visa’s pilot program, enabling issuers and acquirers to settle transactions using stablecoins rather than fiat.

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The move highlights the ongoing stablecoin race in the payments industry, with Mastercard recently enabling stablecoin card spending in the US via the self-custodial crypto wallet MetaMask.

Onchain support enabled through Bridge’s partnership with Lead Bank

When the card program launched in 2025, transactions were processed by Bridge, deducting funds from the customer’s stablecoin balance and converting them into fiat, allowing merchants to receive payment in local currency like any other card transaction.

Under the new collaboration, enabled by independent commercial bank Lead Bank, settlement is now set to occur directly in stablecoins.

Bridge received conditional approval from a US regulator to become a national trust bank in mid-February. Source: Bridge

“Now, through Bridge’s partnership with Lead Bank, these card transactions can be settled onchain with Visa,” the announcement noted.

“Visa is committed to meeting businesses where they operate, and increasingly, that’s onchain,” Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield said. “Expanding our work with Bridge gives us one more way to bring the speed, transparency and programmability of stablecoins directly into the settlement process,” he added.

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Related: Stripe considers acquiring some or all of PayPal: Report

Additionally, Visa is evaluating potential support for Bridge-issued assets, or stablecoins created and managed using Bridge’s infrastructure platform. Unlike major stablecoins such as Tether’s USDt (USDT) or Circle’s USDC (USDC), Bridge-issued stablecoins are created programmatically by businesses rather than a third-party issuer.

“This expansion of our work with Visa will enable businesses launching their own custom stablecoins to use them seamlessly within their card programs,” Bridge co-founder and CEO Zach Abrams said.

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