Overview
- Amazon Web Services has confirmed it cannot restore access to its Bahrain region (me-south-1) and that one UAE availability zone (mec1-az2) is irrecoverable.
- The company says the physical strikes damaged multiple data-center zones in the region in a way that exceeded AWS’s regional redundancy design and recovery options.
- AWS advised customers to migrate and use backups earlier this year and helped many move workloads to other regions, but resources hosted only in the destroyed zones are permanently inaccessible.
- AWS is replacing damaged infrastructure in the UAE and will report progress in the coming months while it has scheduled a further update on Bahrain operations for early 2027 and has notified local authorities.
- The losses have hit some banking and enterprise operations and are forcing Gulf cloud and AI planners to shift to wider geographic dispersion, blast‑resistant or underground sites, and tighter disaster‑recovery and insurance rules.