6 months after Iran's drones, AWS's Gulf data centers are still dark

Amazon's Gulf cloud has been broken for more than six months. Before dawn on 1 March 2026, Iranian Shahed drones hit two AWS data centers in the UAE, and another strike landed close to a facility in Bahrain. The UAE hits took out two of the three availability zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region. The damage went beyond power cuts: the buildings were structurally damaged, power delivery failed, and the water from fire suppression did more harm.

More strikes followed, and by early April several zones were marked hard down. By July, the AWS Health Dashboard listed the whole me-south-1 (Bahrain) region as unavailable, and its last update was dated 30 April. That same month Iran's IRGC said it had hit the Bahrain site again with cruise missiles. Iranian state media called Amazon a target because it supports the US military. AWS waived March charges in the UAE region, and Snowflake and Red Hat told their customers to move their workloads to other regions. Careem, Alaan, Hubpay, Emirates NBD and ADCB all reported disruptions.

Most cloud outages last hours. This one is measured in months, because the servers have to be rebuilt, not rebooted, and it's still unclear whether the facilities have stopped being targets.

Why it matters: data centers are now military targets, so "which region?" has become a geopolitical risk question and not just a latency one, especially as AI money pours into the Gulf.