AWS cannot restore access to its Bahrain data center and a UAE zone following damage from the Iran war, impacting regional cloud services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed that it cannot restore access to its Bahrain data center and a cloud zone in the United Arab Emirates after the facilities suffered damage amid the ongoing Iran‑Israel conflict.
Extent of the outage
The outage affects a range of services hosted in the Gulf region, including compute, storage and database offerings that many local enterprises rely on for daily operations.
AWS engineers are still assessing the physical damage, and the company has not provided a timeline for when full functionality will return.
Impact on businesses
Customers in Bahrain, the UAE and neighboring countries have reported disruptions to internal applications, e‑commerce platforms and data‑analytics pipelines.
Some firms are activating multi‑region failover strategies, shifting workloads to AWS regions in Europe or Asia to maintain continuity.
AWS response and next steps
AWS issued a statement acknowledging the damage and pledged to work with local authorities to restore infrastructure as quickly as possible.
The company also urged customers to monitor the AWS Service Health Dashboard for real‑time updates and to consider alternative regions for critical workloads.
- Check the AWS Service Health Dashboard for status alerts
- Review multi‑region disaster‑recovery plans
- Contact AWS Support for guidance on workload migration
Analysts note that the incident highlights the geopolitical risks facing cloud providers with data centers in conflict‑prone areas.
For more details, see Reuters coverage of AWS outage in Bahrain and UAE.