AWS facilities in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain remain mostly offline after Iranian drones hit them in March, testing the region's pitch for AI and data processing

Your cloud-hosted data and services in Bahrain and one UAE zone remain inaccessible, requiring reliance on backups or alternative regional deployments.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is still unable to restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates after they sustained damage from Iranian drone strikes in March. The company stated that the damage in Bahrain affected multiple "availability zones" and exceeded the resilience capabilities of its regional and multi-AZ services. In the UAE, AWS cannot restore resources exclusively hosted in one specific availability zone (mec1-az2) but is working to recover resources across the wider region and its other two affected zones. AWS has been assisting customers in migrating their operations to other regions since the initial damage. In Bahrain, most customers migrated before the region became fully unavailable in April due to a second availability zone disruption. AWS has assessed the damaged infrastructure and exhausted restoration options for data not migrated prior to the outages. The company is working on replacing affected infrastructure in the UAE and plans to provide updates on service restoration in the coming months, with a further update for Bahrain operations expected in early 2027.

The prolonged outage of AWS facilities in Bahrain and the UAE, directly linked to geopolitical conflict, raises significant concerns about the resilience of cloud infrastructure in regions heavily promoting themselves for AI and data processing. This event challenges the perceived stability and security of these locations for hosting sensitive data and high-compute workloads, potentially impacting future investment and the region's ability to attract large-scale technology operations. The current situation tests the efficacy of disaster recovery plans and the ability of major cloud providers to rapidly restore services under such extreme circumstances, setting a precedent for how such incidents will be handled going forward.

The incident necessitates a re-evaluation of regional cloud strategies, pushing for more dispersed, potentially underground, and blast-resistant data center designs as the UAE is reportedly considering. For businesses operating in or planning to operate within the Gulf, this underscores the critical need for robust multi-region redundancy and comprehensive data backup strategies that extend beyond the standard provider guarantees. The extended downtime also highlights the potential for significant operational and financial disruption when core cloud services are compromised by external physical threats, forcing a prioritization of physical security alongside digital resilience in cloud architecture.