“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone,” AWS said.
AWS says it’s unable to restore data inside its Bahrain and parts of its United Arab Emirates data centers that were attacked by Iran via drones strikes in March during the early part of the Iran war.
“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone,” AWS said on its Health Dashboard on Tuesday, around six months after the initial strikes.
AWS Bahrain region has been effectively taken offline after sustaining damage across multiple availability zones, while in the UAE, data in one of three AWS availability zones cannot be recovered.
“Since the disruption began in March, most customers have been able to re-establish their operations in other regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible,” AWS said.
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The Seattle-based cloud giant said it will continue to work on recovering regional resources, as well as zonal resources hosted in the other affected data center availability zones.
Iran Drones Strike AWS Data Centers
Several AWS data centers in the Middle East were hit by drone strikes in early March as the war began, which knocked out power in AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has claimed responsibility for the drone strikes, saying it attacked Amazon for its support of the United States military.
“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” AWS said in early March.
The drone strikes forced AWS customers to move workloads to other Amazon data centers.
The company opened its Bahrain data center in 2019, while its UAE region opened in 2022.
Justin Copie, CEO of Innovative Solutions, said AWS’ inability to restore its data centers is very unfortunate and hopes it doesn’t disrupt AWS’ massive global data center investment ahead.
“People don’t realize how scarce the compute capacity and the [AI] inference capacity is today,” said Copie. “It’s still early days with the amount of capacity that’s available for what we want AI to do.”
Building and expanding its infrastructure via data centers is how AWS creates more compute capacity across a wider global footprint.
“You’re seeing Amazon sink so much capital expense into data centers today to see the ROI in two, three, maybe four years from now because they know that it’s absolutely needed,” Copie said.
Amazon’s $220 Billion Data Center Plan
Amazon has committed $220 billion in CapEx spending in 2026, which will mostly be spent on building new infrastructure.
The company has invested billions this year in new data centers both in the U.S. and abroad.
For example, just a few weeks ago, Amazon unveiled plans to invest $6 billion to build a third data center campus in Louisiana.
AWS’ new $6 billion data center is on top of the $12 billion the company announced in February inside that state, making AWS’ total data center investment in Louisiana approximately $18 billion in 2026 alone.
AWS captured $42.2 billion in total revenue during the second quarter of 2026, elevating Amazon’s cloud unit to a record $169 billion annual run rate.
AWS Restoration Update ‘In Coming Months’
AWS said it remains committed to supporting its customers in Bahrain and the UAE.
“We are working on replacing the affected infrastructure and will provide an update on the restoration of our services in the coming months,” AWS said.
“We have notified the relevant authorities and continue to work with them toward that goal,” AWS concluded in its post.
