Data Centres & Networks

AWS’s war-damaged data centres in Bahrain and UAE still offline

AWS’s war-damaged data centres in Bahrain and UAE still offline

Amazon Web Services (AWS) revealed that it’s been unable to restore access to its data centres in Bahrain and one of its three data centres in the UAE after they were damaged by Iranian drone strikes earlier this year.

On Tuesday, AWS posted on its health dashboard that the damage to its infrastructure in its Middle East (Bahrain) (ME-SOUTH-1) Region “spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.”

One of AWS’ Availability Zone for ME-SOUTH-1 was damaged by drone strikes in early March, while a second Availability Zone was damaged in April.

AWS said it’s unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in that Region, although it added that most of its customers using ME-SOUTH-1 migrated their workloads to other AWS Regions before the second zone went down.

Since then, AWS has helped remaining customers re-establish their operations in alternate Regions, using backups where available or implementing alternative solutions to mitigate the impact of inaccessible data.

“We assessed all affected infrastructure and exhausted every option for restoring data and resources that had not been migrated before the Region became unavailable,” AWS said.

Meanwhile, AWS posted the same day that it has also been unable to restore access to its mec1-az2 Availability Zone in its Middle East (UAE) (ME-CENTRAL-1) Region.

The company said it’s continuing to work on recovering regional resources, as well as zonal resources hosted in its other affected Availability Zones in the UAE – mec1-az1 and mec1-az3.

All three data centres were also damaged by Iranian drone strikes in March.

AWS said it is working to replace the affected infrastructure in the UAE and will provide an update on the restoration of services in the coming months.

As for ME-SOUTH-1, AWS said it will share a further update in early 2027.

The data centres are collateral damage in the ongoing war between the US, Israel and Iran that started at the end of February. After the US and Israel bombed Tehran, killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials, Iran responded with retaliatory attacks on Israel, as well as targets in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

In April, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) named 18 Big Tech companies – including Apple, Cisco, Dell, Google, HP, Intel, IBM, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia – as “legitimate military targets”, as well as Oracle, whose data centre in Dubai was hit in early April, although the company initially denied it.



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