Amazon Web Services has been unable to restore access to some data and resources in Bahrain and the UAE after its cloud infrastructure was damaged during the Iran war, raising fresh questions about the resilience of the digital infrastructure underpinning Gulf businesses and their marketing operations.
The impact is particularly significant in Bahrain, where AWS said damage affected multiple availability zones — clusters of data centres serving the same geographic region. In the UAE, AWS has been unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, known as mec1-az2.
In a September 15 service update first reported by Reuters, AWS said: “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.”
For brands, agencies and media companies, the incident highlights a risk that sits beyond the usual concerns around cybersecurity and data breaches: the physical vulnerability of the cloud infrastructure supporting increasingly digital marketing operations.
Customer databases, CRM systems, audience data, campaign assets, analytics platforms and other marketing workflows are increasingly hosted in cloud environments. A prolonged loss of access can therefore affect not only IT operations but also customer engagement, campaign measurement and business continuity.
Cloud resilience matters
The disruption began in March after US and Israeli attacks on Iran prompted Iranian missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases. AWS said two of its UAE facilities were directly struck, while a drone strike near one of its Bahrain facilities physically damaged infrastructure.
AWS began recommending that Bahrain customers migrate their workloads to other regions after the first availability zone was damaged in March. Most customers did so before a second availability zone was disrupted in April, leaving the Bahrain region unavailable.
AWS said it had helped customers re-establish operations in other regions, using backups where available or alternative solutions to mitigate the impact of inaccessible data.
But some data could not be recovered.
The company 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.”
That distinction could become increasingly important for Gulf marketers as companies accelerate their investments in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and data-driven customer engagement.
The AWS incident also raises questions about how brands should approach geographic redundancy. Keeping critical data and workloads in a single cloud region can simplify operations, but the events in Bahrain and the UAE demonstrate the consequences when physical infrastructure in an entire region is disrupted.
AWS said it is continuing to replace affected infrastructure in the UAE and will provide an update on restoration in the coming months. It plans to provide a further update on Bahrain operations in early 2027.
For Gulf businesses, the episode is a reminder that “in the cloud” does not necessarily mean geographically resilient — a consideration likely to become more important as marketing, advertising and AI infrastructure across the region becomes increasingly dependent on large-scale data centres.
