AWS Bahrain cloud region disrupted again by drone activity

09:20

By: Dakir Madiha

AWS Bahrain cloud region disrupted again by drone activity

Amazon said Monday that its Amazon Web Services cloud region in Bahrain was disrupted by drone activity, marking the second incident affecting the facility since the start of the US-led conflict with Iran earlier this month. The disruption underscores rising risks to digital infrastructure in a region increasingly exposed to military escalation.

The outage was first reported by Reuters, with an Amazon spokesperson confirming that the disruption was linked to drone activity near the site. The company said it is assisting customers in shifting workloads to other AWS regions while recovery efforts continue. Amazon did not provide details on the extent of the damage or a timeline for full restoration.

In a statement, AWS urged clients operating in affected zones to continue migrating services to alternative regions. The company has previously advised customers to rely on redundancy and disaster recovery systems as instability spreads across the Middle East.

The latest disruption follows a broader attack on March 1, when drone strikes attributed to Iran damaged three AWS data centers in the region. Two facilities in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain were affected. According to AWS status updates, the strikes caused structural damage, power outages, fires, and water damage triggered by fire suppression systems.

Those earlier incidents disabled multiple availability zones, including two out of three in the UAE’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region and one in Bahrain’s ME-SOUTH-1 region. The outages disrupted key cloud services such as EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, and RDS. The impact extended to consumer and financial services across the Gulf, affecting ride-hailing platform Careem, payment firms Hubpay and Alaan, and major banks including Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank.

Reports cited by Tom’s Hardware indicated that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility for targeting the Bahrain site, alleging that AWS hosts US military workloads there. Amazon has not commented on those claims.

The repeated incidents have intensified concerns about the vulnerability of hyperscale cloud infrastructure in conflict zones. The Uptime Institute described the March 1 attack as the first confirmed military strike against a major cloud provider. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that data centers and supporting energy infrastructure could become strategic targets, similar to oil facilities in previous conflicts.

AWS has continued to recommend that customers activate disaster recovery plans and shift workloads to regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific. The ongoing conflict, which President Donald Trump said could last several weeks, is already influencing investment decisions by major technology firms operating in the Middle East.