Six Months After Iran Drone Strikes, AWS Says Bahrain and UAE Cloud Zones Cannot Be Restored

CNBC (Annie Palmer, 15 September 2026) reported Amazon Web Services posted Health Dashboard updates saying it cannot restore access to Bahrain region resources, or to data hosted exclusively in one UAE availability zone, six months after early March drone strikes. The Next Web and Silicon UK carried the same dashboard language on 15 and 16 September.

These are AWS Health Dashboard status updates, the first public company note since April on March war damage to Gulf cloud facilities. This is not a product launch and not a security advisory.

AWS said the damage spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand. In March, two UAE data centers were struck directly. A Bahrain facility was damaged by a nearby strike. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed the Bahrain hit and cited Amazon support for the US military, CNBC reported.

Silicon UK quotes AWS saying data and resources stored exclusively in UAE zone mec1-az2 cannot be restored. The company is still working on two other UAE zones. For Bahrain, AWS said it has exhausted options for data that was not migrated and cannot restore that data.

A UAE update is expected in the coming months. A Bahrain operations update is slated for early 2027.

AWS told customers to migrate and stopped billing for the affected regions. By the end of April about 60 services in the region were still down. Many customers moved. The unrestorable risk sits with workloads and data kept only in the Bahrain region or in mec1-az2.

The Next Web notes AWS has not said whether damaged buildings can be repaired or must be replaced. CNBC, citing Reuters, says the UAE is considering dispersing Stargate-style sites, plus underground or blast-resistant designs and interceptors. That redesign talk is secondary reporting, not an AWS admission.

Gulf siting pressure already sits next to the House Ratepayer Protection Act for data center power costs and Thailand's pause on data-center projects. Separate infrastructure tape includes CISA's China AI distillation warning on DeepSeek and Alibaba.

Cloud buyers with Gulf-only residency or single-region backups should treat multi-AZ inside one war zone as insufficient and require documented cross-region backup plus war-risk insurance language.