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

Amazon Web Services says it cannot restore access to its Bahrain cloud region, or to data stored only in one UAE availability zone, six months after drone strikes hit its Gulf facilities.

CNBC reported the Health Dashboard updates on 15 September 2026. The Next Web and Silicon UK carried the same dashboard language on 15 and 16 September. The posts are the first public company note since April on March war damage to those sites.

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 already sits under the same pressure as Thailand's pause on data-center projects. Multi-AZ inside one war zone was not enough.

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