Amazon AWS Works to Restore Bahrain and UAE Cloud Services After War

Amazon Web Services still cannot restore access to its cloud computing facility in Bahrain or to one of three data-hosting zones in the UAE, months after both were damaged during the war involving Iran, according to a status update seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

AWS said the damage in Bahrain affected multiple availability zones, clusters of data centers within the same region, and that the scale of the destruction exceeded what its regional and multi-zone systems are designed to withstand. The company said it has been helping Bahrain-based customers shift their operations to other regions in response. In the UAE, AWS said it remains unable to restore access to resources hosted exclusively in one zone known as mec1-az2, and is continuing efforts to recover infrastructure across the broader UAE region and the other two affected zones.

The disruptions trace back to March, when US and Israeli strikes on Iran triggered retaliatory missile and drone attacks on Israel and Gulf states. AWS previously said two of its UAE facilities were directly struck, while a drone strike near one of its Bahrain facilities caused physical damage to its infrastructure. The resulting outages disrupted some banking operations at the time, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters.

After the first Bahrain zone was damaged in March, AWS began advising customers to migrate their workloads elsewhere, and most did so before a second zone was hit in April, effectively taking the entire Bahrain region offline. Since then, AWS said it has helped customers restore operations in alternative regions using backups or other workarounds where data couldn’t be recovered, and has now exhausted its options for restoring resources that weren’t migrated in time.

The company said it remains committed to supporting customers in both countries. In the UAE, it’s working to replace the damaged infrastructure and expects to provide an update on service restoration in the coming months, while a further update on Bahrain operations is planned for early 2027. AWS said it has notified relevant authorities in both countries and continues to coordinate with them.

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