Amazon’s AWS unable to restore access at some Mideast data centers after Iran war damage

Amazon Web Services cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the UAE following damage sustained during the Iran war. AWS said the damage spanned multiple availability zones in Bahrain and exceeded what its services are designed to withstand. The company is helping customers reestablish operations in other regions and continues to work on recovering resources in the UAE.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates following damage sustained during the Iran war. The damage in Bahrain spanned multiple availability zones — clusters of one or more data centers in the same geographic region — and exceeded what AWS's regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand, according to a status update seen by Reuters. AWS is helping Bahrain-based customers reestablish operations in other regions. In the UAE, AWS cannot restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, known as mec1-az2, and is continuing work on recovering resources across the wider UAE region and the other two affected zones. The disruptions began in March 2026 following US and Israeli attacks on Iran, which prompted Tehran to retaliate with missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases. AWS said at the time that two of its facilities in the UAE had been directly struck, while a drone strike close to one of its facilities in Bahrain had physically damaged its infrastructure. The AWS outages affected some banking operations at the time. The attacks have raised questions about the resilience of the Gulf's rapidly expanding cloud and artificial-intelligence infrastructure. The UAE is revising plans for a major AI data-center project following the Iranian attacks, including by considering dispersing facilities and using underground and blast-resistant infrastructure. AWS said it had assessed all affected infrastructure and exhausted every option for restoring data and resources that had not been migrated before the Bahrain region became unavailable. It will provide an update on restoration of services in the coming months for the UAE and in early 2027 for Bahrain.