Iranian Drone and Missile Strikes Hit AWS Data Centers in UAE and Bahrain

In March 2026, during the Middle East conflict, Iran used drones and missiles to attack Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Amazon updated the AWS status page to explain the situation at the Bahrain data center and the UAE's MEC1-AZ2 availability zone.

Amazon confirmed that all resources and data in the Bahrain data center can no longer be accessed, and that data in some availability zones of the UAE data center is likewise unrecoverable. Amazon plans to replace damaged hardware in other affected UAE availability zones to try to restore access, but there is currently no clear maintenance plan for MEC1-AZ2. For the affected UAE availability zones, customers must rely primarily on their own backups; if a customer did not perform cross-zone backups before the attack, all of their stored data is also inaccessible.

Two AWS infrastructure sites in the UAE were directly hit. The Bahrain data center was more severely affected after the drone attack, and Amazon said at the time that the data center suffered damage to power, network, and equipment. Amazon acknowledged that the Bahrain data center's infrastructure spans multiple availability zones, exceeding the tolerance originally designed for other regional and multi-availability-zone services, and that all availability zones intended for mutual redundancy were damaged, so Amazon cannot help customers recover their data.