Gone for good: AWS writes off its entire Bahrain cloud region after Iranian strikes
What happened? Amazon Web ServicesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → told customers in a Health Dashboard update on 15 September 2026 that it cannot restore resources and data hosted exclusively in its Middle East (Bahrain) region, me-south-1. AWS said the damage to its infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand. In the Middle East (UAE) region, me-central-1, the permanent loss is limited to one Availability Zone (mec1-az2), while AWS continues to recover resources in the other two affected zones.
How it unfolded: Iranian drone strikes in March 2026 damaged three AWS data centres across the two regions, impairing two of the three UAE zones and one Bahrain facility. AWS first advised customers to replicate critical data elsewhere, then to move workloads out of the Middle East entirely. Further strikes in April disrupted a second Bahrain zone and made the whole region unavailable, and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed another attack on the Bahrain region in July. AWS says most customers had already migrated or restarted elsewhere from backups. It is replacing the damaged infrastructure, has notified the relevant authorities, and expects to give a further update on Bahrain in early 2027. The Bahrain region opened in 2019 and the UAE region in 2022.
Why it matters: Multi-AZ design spreads workloads across facilities roughly 100 kilometres apart, which covers power cuts, storms and earthquakes but not coordinated physical attacks on several sites. AWS's own disaster recovery guidance has long told customers to copy backups to a second region, and the shared responsibility model puts that duty on the customer. The episode also exposes a tension for companies bound by data residency rules, which may not be allowed to keep a copy outside the country at all. With AWS committing $5.3B to a new Saudi region due in December 2026, geopolitical risk is becoming an explicit factor in where cloud capacity is built and how customers architect around it.
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