Amazon Web Services has stated that it can no longer 100% restore its cloud infrastructure damaged by the war in the Middle East and that part of its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates (UAE) operations are still unavailable, months after the attacks.
AWS stated that the facility was damaged due to a drone strike in its vicinity in Bahrain, and two of its facilities in UAE were directly hit. The damage in Bahrain was wide, impacting multiple availability zones and more extensive than what its regional systems were built to withstand.
In April, a second AZ was affected, and Bahrain was finally brought down. AWS has previously been encouraging customers to shift their workloads to other regions, and so most customers have done so well before the broader outage.
AWS has since assisted customers impacted by the issue with restoring operations at other facilities via backup and alternate solutions, it said. However, following a review of the infrastructure that was damaged, the company stated there were no more avenues to recover data and resources that did not move to the Bahrain region before it lost its connectivity.
AWS said in the UAE it still can’t back up resources and data stored in an availability zone (mec1-az2) that is solely reliant on one another. Recovery efforts are ongoing in other availability zones in the UAE region and damaged infrastructure is being replaced.
The disruptions have had some impact on businesses and the previous banking outages underscore the dangers of relying on businesses on cloud services that are also heavily based in a conflict zone.
The attacks have also raised more general concerns about the security of Gulf data centres, as nations in the region are spending vast sums on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Now, the UAE is mulling over more distributed, blast resistant and underground facilities for key AI programs.
AWS has pledged to support customers in Bahrain and the UAE. The company intends to give another update about Bahrain recovery in early 2027.
Suggested reading: Reuters via CNA
