Amazon Web Services cannot restore access to its cloud-computing facility in Bahrain and one of three data-hosting zones in the UAE following damage during the Iran war, according to a status update seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
Amazon’s cloud computing unit AWS said the damage in Bahrain spanned multiple so-called availability zones, which are clusters of one or more data centres in the same geographic region.
“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS said in the status update, which Reuters was first to report. AWS said it was helping Bahrain-based customers to re-establish operations in other regions.
In the UAE, AWS said it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in one availability zone, known as mec1-az2. It is continuing to work on recovering resources across the wider UAE region and in the other two affected zones.
The disruptions began in March following US and Israeli attacks on Iran, which prompted Tehran to retaliate with missile and drone strikes on Israel and Gulf states.
AWS said at the time that two of its facilities in the UAE had been directly struck, while a drone strike close to one of its facilities in Bahrain had physically damaged its infrastructure. The AWS outages affected some banking operations at the time, Reuters has reported, citing a person familiar with the situation.
After the first availability zone in Bahrain was damaged in March, AWS began recommending that customers migrate their workloads to other regions, it said in Tuesday’s update. Most did so before the Bahrain region became unavailable following disruption to a second availability zone in April.
AWS said it had since supported customers in re-establishing
operations in alternative regions, using backups where available
or implementing alternative solutions to mitigate the impact of
inaccessible data.
The company said it had assessed all affected infrastructure
and exhausted every option for restoring data and resources that
had not been migrated before the Bahrain region became
unavailable.
AWS said it remained committed to supporting customers in
both countries.
In the UAE, the company said it was working to replace
affected infrastructure and would provide an update on
restoration of services in the coming months. It also said it
would provide a further update in early 2027 for Bahrain
operations.
The company said it had notified the relevant authorities in
both countries and continued to work with them.
Source: Khaleej Times