DUBAI (Dispatches) -- Users across the UAE and globally are reporting major connectivity errors on ChatGPT, with OpenAI confirming it is investigating widespread disruptions affecting the web app, mobile application, and developer APIs. 
The global outage comes amid a broader escalation between Iran and U.S.-Israeli forces, with Iranian strikes directly targeting AI data centers in the UAE that support Western military terrorism. 
Reports indicate that Iranian drones struck Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. The strikes targeted facilities being used by the U.S. to carry out terrorist strikes against Iranian civilian and military infrastructure. 
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) had previously issued clear public warnings that “all power plants, energy infrastructure, and information and communications technology of the Zionist regime, and all similar companies within the region that have American shareholders shall face complete and utter annihilation”.
Iran has specifically identified OpenAI’s $30 billion Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi as a legitimate target. The IRGC published a threat video on April 3 using satellite imagery of the facility, with an on-screen message reading “Nothing stays hidden to our sight, though hidden by Google”. 
IRGC Brigadier General Ebrahim Zolfaghari conditioned strikes on U.S. execution of threats to bomb Iranian power plants and desalination facilities
The Stargate campus, built in partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia, has a total capacity of 5 gigawatts and serves half the world’s population. Iran has said that since the U.S. struck Iranian technology infrastructure, including Sharif University of Technology’s computing center, it has the legal right to retaliate against American AI facilities in the region.
The attacks have caused cascading disruptions across multiple AI platforms. Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Gemini all experienced outages because their services depend on AWS West Asia nodes. 
A fire at an AWS data center in the UAE forced firefighters to cut power to the entire building, leaving key server zones “in the dark”. Cloudflare, which serves as a “guardian” for many websites, also began failing.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded in March 2026 that Iran expanded its target list to 29 tech facilities across Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, and the UAE, confirming that data infrastructure now constitutes a deliberate line of attack.