New York, March 3, 2026, 10:43 (ET) — Regular session
Amazon.com Inc stock dropped roughly 2.6% to $203 early Tuesday, following news from the company’s cloud division that AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain had been hit in drone attacks. Service disruptions followed, and Amazon warned the recovery process would likely be “prolonged.” Reuters
Why it matters now: AWS underpins everything from e-commerce to financials and airlines. When data centers face a physical threat, traders start working out what it could mean for service reliability, customer confidence, even the speed at which workloads might need to move.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Tech giants are under pressure to deliver on hefty AI investments, and market swings have been especially hard on stocks vulnerable to the next jolt. “The U.S. equity market is sort of in its late cycle, trying to find the winners and losers of this new disruptive technology,” said John Velis, Americas macro strategist at BNY. Reuters
AWS disclosed Sunday that a temporary power shutdown hit a UAE data center after objects made contact, which caused sparks and a fire. The company described an “Availability Zone” as a cluster of connected data centers within a region. According to AWS, its other UAE zones weren’t affected and continued running as usual. Reuters
Ripple effects have reached past the cloud dashboard. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank reported that a region-wide IT disruption knocked out its mobile banking and contact centre services for a time, but stopped short of linking the outage to AWS.
Beyond the outage, Amazon’s expansion in Spain is grabbing investor attention. On Monday, the company announced plans to pump another 18 billion euros ($21 billion) into the country, targeting more data centres and a bigger push into AI. That pushes Amazon’s total committed investment in Spain up to 33.7 billion euros. Board chair David Zapolsky described the strategy as positioning Spain as Amazon’s “AI epicentre” in Europe. Reuters
AMZN has felt the pressure from all that spending. Back in early February, Amazon laid out a plan to boost its 2026 capital expenditures to roughly $200 billion—jumping from $131 billion the year before. That forecast knocked the stock down hard.
Tuesday saw losses across the board. The Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq’s tech focus, slipped roughly 2.6%. SPDR S&P 500 ETF fell about 2.4%. Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta—some of the biggest names—also ended lower.
Still, headlines are driving this story. Should AWS repairs stretch out, or if physical issues keep capacity down, customers could have to shift computing loads to different regions. The longer that situation drags, the deeper the impact: service penalties stack up, extra costs pile in, and reputational risks grow.
Right now, traders are glued to AWS outage updates—any signal on service recovery or fallout for customers is front and center. Then there’s the February U.S. Employment Situation report, dropping Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET. It’s a number that swings rate bets and hits big tech hard.
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