AWS says it cannot restore Gulf cloud facilities damaged in Iran war

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 1.26% Web Services announced on Tuesday that it cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates, months after the infrastructure was damaged during the Iran war.

The admission, first reported by Reuters, marks the clearest acknowledgment yet that the conflict has inflicted lasting damage on the Gulf region's cloud infrastructure — raising questions about the viability of centralized data operations in geopolitically volatile areas.

Damage Beyond Design Limits

"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 a status update seen by Reuters. Availability zones are clusters of one or more data centers in the same geographic region, and AWS's architecture is built on the assumption that spreading workloads across them provides redundancy against localized failures.reuters

In Bahrain, the damage proved irreparable. 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 went fully offline. In the UAE, the company said one availability zone, known as mec1-az2, remains inaccessible, though it is continuing recovery work across the wider UAE region and the other two affected zones.economictimes

A Cascading Crisis

The disruptions trace back to March, when U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran prompted Tehran to retaliate with missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases. Two AWS facilities in the UAE were directly struck, while a drone strike near a facility in Bahrain physically damaged its infrastructure. In April, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps struck the Bahrain facility again after officially designating 18 U.S. technology companies — including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — as legitimate military targets.newsonair+1

After the first Bahrain availability zone was damaged in March, AWS recommended that customers migrate workloads to other regions. Most did so before a second availability zone was disrupted in April, rendering the entire Bahrain region unavailable. AWS said it has since helped customers re-establish operations elsewhere using backups or alternative solutions.economictimes

Rethinking Gulf Infrastructure

The outages, which affected some banking operations earlier this year, have cast doubt on the durability of the Gulf's expanding cloud and artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Reuters reported last week that the UAE is revising plans for a major AI data center project, considering dispersed facilities and underground, blast-resistant construction.reuters+1

AWS said it would provide an update on UAE service restoration in the coming months and a further update on Bahrain operations in early 2027.economictimes