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Amazon cloud infrastructure in Bahrain, UAE damaged beyond repair after Iran strikes
AWS says Iranian strikes left one Bahrain region and one UAE availability zone beyond recovery. The company is moving customers to other regions while rebuilding infrastructure and reviewing restoration timelines.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that it cannot restore access to select cloud facilities and data centres in the UAE and Bahrain following strikes by Iran earlier this year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has stated that the company cannot restore access to select cloud computing facilities in the Middle East following strikes by Iran earlier this year. As per a status update on Tuesday, AWS said that one cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of its three data-hosting zones in the UAE had sustained damage during the Iran war. The company is unable to restore access to these facilities.
AWS said the damage in Bahrain affected multiple availability zones and was beyond the level its regional systems were designed to handle. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the update read.
An availability zone refers to a cluster of one or more data centres in the same geographic region. Amazon Web Services uses such clusters to keep services running if one site goes down. The company said it was helping Bahrain-based customers to re-establish operations in other regions and remained committed to customers in both countries.
In the UAE, the company stated that it could not restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, identified as mec1-az2. Recovery work is continuing in the wider UAE region and in the other affected zones. As per AWS, most affected customers had already re-established operations in other regions after moving workloads or restoring backups.
Iran struck Amazon facilities earlier this year
As per reports, the company is replacing affected infrastructure in the UAE, stating that it would provide an update on restoration there in the coming months. For Bahrain, AWS reportedly said that it would share a further update in early 2027.
The disruption to the company’s services began in March after US and Israeli attacks on Iran, which were followed by Iranian missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting US military bases. AWS had said at the time that two of its facilities in the UAE were directly struck, while a drone strike near one of its facilities in Bahrain caused physical damage to infrastructure there.
AWS said that after the first availability zone in Bahrain was damaged in March, it began advising customers to move workloads to other regions. Most customers did so before the Bahrain region became unavailable after disruption to a second availability zone in April, the company said.
In July, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed it had targeted and destroyed AWS's central data infrastructure in Bahrain with cruise missiles. Though Amazon, Bahraini authorities and US officials did not confirm the strike on these facilities.
Amazon was not the only company to be targeted by Iran during the conflict. Tehran had also claimed to have struck an Oracle facility in April. Though Oracle did not confirm the strike. The IRGC had also threatened to strike as many as 29 regional tech-company sites in the Middle East, including those of Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Palantir.
