Customers that kept data and computing systems in Amazon Web Services facilities in Bahrain now face the prospect that some of those resources cannot be restored. AWS said damage from the Iran war had exceeded the resilience measures designed into its regional cloud network.
The company said it could not restore access to its Bahrain cloud-computing facility or to one of three data-hosting zones in the United Arab Emirates. Banking operations were among the services affected by the outages.
The disruption began in March, after U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran led Tehran to launch retaliatory missile and drone strikes against Israel and Gulf states hosting U.S. military bases. AWS said two of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates had been directly hit. A drone strike close to an AWS facility in Bahrain also caused physical damage to its infrastructure.
AWS runs its cloud systems across availability zones, which are clusters of one or more data centres within the same geographic region. The company uses several zones in a region to help customers keep services running when infrastructure fails in one location.
In Bahrain, however, the damage spread across multiple Availability Zones. AWS said the impact went beyond what its regional and multi-availability-zone services were built to withstand.
After the first Bahrain availability zone was damaged in March, AWS began advising customers to move their workloads to other regions. Most customers did so before the Bahrain region became unavailable after disruption to a second availability zone in April, the company said.
AWS said it had since reviewed all affected infrastructure and used every available recovery option for data and resources that customers had failed to migrate before the Bahrain region went offline. It said it could no longer restore those resources.
The company did not say how many customers remained in Bahrain when the wider outage occurred, how much data was affected, or whether any material could be recovered from the damaged systems. It also gave no assessment of the financial effect on customers or on AWS.
In the United Arab Emirates, AWS said it had been unable to restore access to data and resources hosted exclusively in an availability zone identified as mec1-az2. The company operates three data-hosting zones in the country. It said it would give an update on efforts to restore UAE services in the coming months.
AWS said it had informed the relevant authorities in both countries and was continuing to work with them. It plans a further update on Bahrain operations in early 2027.
The incidents show the limits of cloud redundancy when damage affects several parts of the same regional network. Customers that had moved workloads after the first Bahrain disruption retained access through other regions, according to AWS. Those that had not migrated before the April outage now face a loss of access that AWS says it cannot reverse.
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