Overview
- AWS announced it cannot restore access to its entire Bahrain cloud region and to one UAE availability zone after damage from Iranian missile and drone strikes.
- The company said damage in Bahrain crossed multiple Availability Zones and exceeded the design limits of its regional and multi‑AZ protections.
- Most affected customers rebuilt operations by moving workloads to other regions or restoring backups but some data and resources hosted only in the damaged zones are permanently inaccessible.
- AWS said it has exhausted recovery options for unrecovered data, has notified local authorities, is replacing affected equipment in the UAE, and will provide a UAE update in the coming months and a Bahrain update in early 2027.
- The strikes, which began in March 2026, have prompted Gulf states and cloud firms to rethink large AI and data‑center plans by weighing greater geographic dispersion, hardened construction, on‑site defenses, and new disaster‑recovery and insurance approaches.