Amazon Web Services has reported fresh disruptions at its Bahrain data centre (ME-SOUTH-1) following new drone activity in the region, marking the second time the facility has been targeted since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran. The incident has raised urgent questions about the vulnerability of the world's most critical digital infrastructure to physical warfare.
Second strike on Bahrain in weeks
The latest disruption marks the second time since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran that AWS' Bahrain region has been hit by drone activity. Reuters reports that Amazon has confirmed the disruption, saying it is helping customers migrate workloads to alternate AWS regions while recovery is ongoing. The company declined to specify the extent of the damage or an estimated timeline for full restoration.
The strikes caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases triggered fire suppression systems that resulted in additional water damage to equipment. AWS told customers it expects recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved. The company has urged customers to activate disaster recovery plans and shift operations to unaffected regions.
AWS in UAE also hit earlier this month
The incident follows a series of drone strikes on March 1, that triggered one of the most severe cloud outages in AWS history, knocking out or degrading more than 109 services across the ME-CENTRAL-1 UAE region. The UAE strikes took out two of three availability zones, while Bahrain lost one zone to a localised power issue caused by a nearby explosion. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps explicitly claimed responsibility for those attacks, citing the data centres' role in supporting U.S. military and intelligence networks.
The earlier outages cascaded into consumer-facing services, disrupting ride-sharing platform Careem, payments firms Hubpay and Alaan, data management company Snowflake, and several major UAE banks including Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank.
Earlier last week, Iran news outlets reporteda list of potential targets for Iran on Telegram, including the offices of tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia in Gulf countries and Israel.
