Smoke rose over southern Beirut on Tuesday after fresh Israeli airstrikes targeted the Lebanese capital’s suburbs, as the escalating Middle East conflict increasingly affects civilian and commercial infrastructure across the Gulf.

Late Monday, Amazon confirmed that two of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates were directly struck by drones, disrupting cloud services in parts of the region. The company also said a facility in Bahrain sustained damage from a nearby drone strike.

In a statement posted on its service dashboard, Amazon said the affected sites “experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes” amid the ongoing hostilities.

“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,” the company said.

The disclosure represents a rare confirmation of direct physical attacks on major commercial cloud infrastructure in the Gulf, highlighting the broader risks to global technology networks as tensions rise between the United States, Israel and Iran.

Amazon did not indicate whether any employees were injured but said it was working with local authorities and prioritising staff safety during recovery operations.

Its cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, is the world’s largest provider of cloud infrastructure, supporting thousands of applications, websites and artificial intelligence platforms worldwide. It competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in delivering enterprise-scale digital services.

The company advised customers in the affected regions to back up critical data and consider shifting workloads to servers outside the impacted areas while engineers work to restore full operations.

The strikes on commercial facilities follow days of cross-border attacks and heightened military activity, with several Gulf cities reporting collateral damage since the latest escalation in the regional conflict.