Amazon Web Services struggles to restore cloud access in Bahrain and UAE after military strikes

For most companies, a cloud outage is measured in minutes and resolved with a status-page update. For AWS customers in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, the outage is measured in months, with no clear end in sight. As of mid-September 2026, Amazon Web Services has been unable to restore full operations at its Bahrain region, designated ME-SOUTH-1, or at one of the three availability zones inside its UAE region, ME-CENTRAL-1. The cause is not a software bug or a misconfigured router. Iranian drone and missile strikes in early March 2026, launched in retaliation for US and Israeli military operations, caused structural damage, power failures, and water damage from fire suppression systems across multiple AWS facilities simultaneously. How the damage broke AWS’s own redundancy model Cloud providers design their infrastructure around a core assumption: that disasters are local. An availability zone going down should leave the other zones in the same region unaffected, so workloads shift automatically and users barely notice. What happened in March broke that model. Damage spread across multiple availability zones in a single event, which exceeds the failure scenarios that multi-AZ architectures a...