Amazon's AWS is unable to restore access to Bahrain, one UAE cloud data zone after war damage

Reuterswas ⁠first to report. AWS said it was helping Bahrain-based customers to re-establish operations in other regions. In the UAE, AWS said ​it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, known as mec1-az2.

It is continuing ​to work on recovering resources across the wider UAE region and in the other two affected zones. Also Read:OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are working to create an AI standards body.

The disruptions began in March 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, Reuters‌has reported, citing ⁠a person familiar with the situation.

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-centre project following the Iranian attacks, including by considering dispersing facilities and using underground and blast-resistant infrastructure, Reutersreported last week.

After the first availability zone in Bahrain was damaged in March, AWS began recommending ​that customers migrate their workloads ​to other regions, it said ⁠in Tuesday's update. Most did so before the Bahrain region became unavailable following disruption to a second availability zone in April.

AWS said it had since supported customers in re-establishing operations in alternative ​regions, using backups where available or implementing alternative solutions to mitigate 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 working to ⁠replace affected ​infrastructure and would provide an update on restoration of services in the ​coming months.

It also said it would provide a further update in early 2027 for Bahrain operations. The company said it had notified the relevant authorities in ​both countries and continued to work with them.