Amazon Web Services has said it cannot restore access to a cloud computing facility in Bahrain and one of three affected data-hosting zones in the UAE after infrastructure was damaged during the Iran war.
AWS disclosed the situation in a status update seen by Reuters on Tuesday. The company said damage in Bahrain affected multiple availability zones, which are groups of one or more data centres operating 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 restore their operations using AWS facilities in other regions. After the first Bahrain availability zone was damaged in March, AWS began advising customers to move their workloads to alternative regions.
Most customers had migrated their operations before the Bahrain region became unavailable following further disruption to a second availability zone in April, according to AWS.
The company said it had since worked with customers to restore operations in alternative regions. Where possible, customers used backups or alternative arrangements to reduce the impact of inaccessible data and resources.
AWS said it had assessed all affected infrastructure in Bahrain and exhausted available options for restoring data and resources that had not been migrated before the regional outage.
In the UAE, AWS said it was unable to restore access to resources and data stored exclusively in one availability zone, identified as mec1-az2. The company is continuing recovery efforts across the wider UAE region and in the other two affected availability zones.
AWS said it was replacing damaged infrastructure in the UAE and expected to provide an update on service restoration in the coming months. For Bahrain, the company said it would issue another update in early 2027.
The disruptions began in March following US and Israeli attacks on Iran, which triggered Iranian missile and drone strikes against Israel and Gulf states.
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 caused physical damage to infrastructure.
The outages affected some banking operations in the region, Reuters previously reported, citing a person familiar with the situation.
The incidents have highlighted the vulnerability of cloud infrastructure to physical damage during regional conflicts. Availability zones are designed to provide redundancy within cloud regions, but AWS said the scale of the damage in Bahrain exceeded what its regional and multi-zone systems were designed to withstand.
AWS said it had notified relevant authorities in Bahrain and the UAE and continued to work with officials in both countries.
The company said it remained committed to supporting customers affected by the disruptions while recovery and replacement work continued.
