Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been unable to restore access to its cloud-computing region in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates after infrastructure was damaged during the Iran war, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
According to an AWS status update seen by Reuters, the damage in Bahrain affected multiple “availability zones” — clusters of one or more data centres within the same geographic region.
“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS said in the update.
The company said it was helping customers in Bahrain re-establish operations in other AWS regions.
In the UAE, AWS said it had been unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, identified as mec1-az2. The company said it was continuing efforts to recover resources across the wider UAE region and the two other affected zones.
The disruptions began in March after US and Israeli attacks on Iran triggered Iranian missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases.
AWS said at the time that two of its UAE facilities had been directly hit, while a drone strike near one of its Bahrain facilities physically damaged infrastructure. The outages also affected some banking operations, Reuters reported, citing a person familiar with the situation.
The damage has raised broader questions about the resilience of the Gulf’s rapidly expanding cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure.
Reuters reported last week that the UAE was revising plans for a major AI data-centre project following the Iranian attacks. The changes under consideration included spreading facilities across different locations and using underground and blast-resistant infrastructure.
After the first availability zone in Bahrain was damaged in March, AWS began advising customers to move their workloads to other regions. Most customers did so before the Bahrain region became unavailable following disruption to a second availability zone in April, according to the company.
AWS said it had since helped customers restore operations in alternative regions, using backups where available or adopting other measures to reduce the impact of inaccessible data.
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.
AWS said it remained committed to supporting customers in both countries.
In the UAE, the company said it was replacing damaged infrastructure and would provide an update on service restoration in the coming months. For Bahrain, AWS said it would provide another update in early 2027.
The company said it had notified the relevant authorities in both countries and continued to work with them.
