Overview
- A wave of Iranian drone and missile strikes in March damaged Amazon Web Services sites in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi and set fires that led authorities to cut power and water damage, leaving the facilities heavily impaired.
- AWS says the destruction in Bahrain and one UAE availability zone 'spanned multiple Availability Zones' and exceeded the design limits of its regional and multi-AZ protections, and the company has not given a restoration date as of September 15, 2026.
- While AWS is helping customers move workloads to other regions and has offered billing relief, dozens of regional services and banking and fintech apps remained disrupted as operators reroute traffic and re-establish systems abroad.
- The outages raise a new cost and security calculus for Gulf governments and U.S. tech firms that had been courting the region for AI infrastructure, prompting talks of costly measures such as underground sites and local air defenses.
- Despite the damage, major cloud providers continue planned Gulf projects, a stance that keeps investment momentum but also forces insurers, tenants and governments to weigh higher hardening and insurance costs.