AWS Bahrain Access Disruption Persists; One UAE Availability Zone Deemed Unrecoverable

AWS has reportedly been unable to restore normal access to some data and compute resources in Bahrain following damage to its cloud infrastructure during military activity. The source’s headline characterises the disruption as still unresolved six months later, although it does not provide a precise reference date for that timeframe.

According to the source, AWS Health reported damage across multiple availability zones in Bahrain that exceeded the designed fault tolerance of AWS’s architecture. AWS has helped move most customer workloads from Bahrain to other AWS regions. However, data stored only in Bahrain without prior backup remains inaccessible.

The same source reports that two AWS data centers in the UAE were directly struck during the military incident in early March, while an AWS facility in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby drone attack. In the UAE, mec1-az2—one of three AWS availability zones—has been confirmed as unrecoverable. The other affected zones, mec1-az1 and mec1-az3, are still being repaired.

For cloud customers and operators, the event is a reminder that multi-AZ deployment within a single region may not protect against a correlated physical event affecting several zones at once. The market implication is not that regional redundancy is ineffective, but that workloads requiring higher continuity may need independently recoverable data copies and tested cross-region failover arrangements.

The source also says UAE authorities are reviewing plans for large AI data centers, including distributed deployment, underground placement and blast protection. No technical details, affected capacity, customer count or repair-completion timetable were provided.