Amazon Web Services says it cannot restore access to its cloud computing facilities in Bahrain or to one of its three data zones in the United Arab Emirates, more than six months after they were damaged in Iranian strikes during the war.
In a status update posted on Tuesday, AWS said the damage in Bahrain spread across several of its data center zones and exceeded what its systems are designed to withstand. The company said it had assessed all of the affected infrastructure and exhausted every option for recovering data that customers had not moved elsewhere before the Bahrain region went offline, Reuters reported.
AWS, Amazon's cloud computing business, runs the online infrastructure behind countless websites, apps, banks and businesses. It organizes its data centers into regions, each made up of separate zones designed so that if one fails, the others keep running. In Bahrain, the damage was severe enough to knock out that backup system.
The trouble began on March 1, days after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28. Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks on Israel and on Gulf states that host U.S. military bases. AWS said at the time that two of its facilities in the UAE had been directly struck by drones, and that a strike near one of its facilities in Bahrain had physically damaged its infrastructure. The Uptime Institute, an industry group, described it as the first confirmed military attack on a major cloud provider.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility, saying it targeted the Bahrain facility because of Amazon's support for the U.S. military. The outages disrupted some banking operations in the region, Reuters reported at the time.
After the first Bahrain zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to move their operations to other regions. Most did so before a second zone went down in April and the entire Bahrain region became unavailable. The company said it has since helped the remaining customers restart elsewhere, using backups where they existed.
In the UAE, AWS said it cannot restore resources that were stored only in the damaged zone, but it is working to replace the affected equipment and will give an update on the region in the coming months. It expects to provide a further update on Bahrain in early 2027. Tuesday's update was the company's first public statement on the incidents since April, according to CNBC.
The attacks have raised questions about the safety of the Gulf's fast-growing cloud and artificial intelligence industry. The UAE is revising plans for a major AI data center project in response, including spreading facilities out and building underground, blast-resistant sites, Reuters reported last week.
AWS operates cloud regions in the UAE, Bahrain and Israel, and is building another in Saudi Arabia.
