Amazon Web Services struggles to restore cloud access in Bahrain and UAE after military strikes

For most companies, a cloud outage is measured in minutes and resolved with a status-page update. For AWS customers in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, the outage is measured in months, with no clear end in sight.

As of mid-September 2026, Amazon Web Services has been unable to restore full operations at its Bahrain region, designated ME-SOUTH-1, or at one of the three availability zones inside its UAE region, ME-CENTRAL-1. The cause is not a software bug or a misconfigured router. Iranian drone and missile strikes in early March 2026, launched in retaliation for US and Israeli military operations, caused structural damage, power failures, and water damage from fire suppression systems across multiple AWS facilities simultaneously.

How the damage broke AWS’s own redundancy model

Cloud providers design their infrastructure around a core assumption: that disasters are local. An availability zone going down should leave the other zones in the same region unaffected, so workloads shift automatically and users barely notice.

What happened in March broke that model. Damage spread across multiple availability zones in a single event, which exceeds the failure scenarios that multi-AZ architectures are built to survive.

AWS has advised affected customers to migrate workloads to alternative regions and restore data from remote backups. The company has suspended billing in the affected regions in some updates, an acknowledgment that it cannot deliver the services customers are paying for.

More than six months after the initial strikes, the majority of computing services at both the Abu Dhabi and Bahrain facilities remain disrupted. This is also, according to available accounts, the first time a major US tech company’s data centers have been directly disrupted by military action.

What’s at stake for the Gulf’s cloud ambitions

The Bahrain and UAE regions were not incidental outposts. AWS launched ME-SOUTH-1 in Bahrain specifically to serve the region’s growing appetite for cloud services, and ME-CENTRAL-1 in the UAE to meet demand from financial institutions, government entities, and enterprises building out digital infrastructure across the Gulf Cooperation Council states.

Organizations relying on the affected AWS regions now face a practical problem: workloads need to move, and moving them takes time, expertise, and money that was not budgeted. For regulated industries like banking and healthcare, data residency requirements may limit where those workloads can go.

Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure both operate in the Middle East, and neither has reported comparable disruptions.

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