AWS Admits Permanent Data Loss in Gulf Data Centers Damaged by Drone Strikes

Amazon Web Services revealed on Tuesday that it is permanently unable to restore operations or retrieve data at cloud facilities in Bahrain and portions of the United Arab Emirates following physical destruction caused by drone strikes over six months ago.

In a notice posted to the AWS health service dashboard, the cloud provider explained that the structural damage sustained by multiple facilities across Bahrain exceeded the architectural redundancy designed into its regional infrastructure. Following an extensive evaluation, the company stated that it is impossible to recover information or cloud resources located exclusively within that regional deployment.

In a concurrent operational notice, AWS confirmed a similar permanent loss of customer data and server resources within one availability zone in the UAE. The company noted that technical teams remain focused on attempting to bring two additional damaged UAE zones back online. The updates represent the cloud giant's first public communications regarding the Middle Eastern outages since April, as first reported by CNBC Business.

The physical disruptions trace back to March, when Amazon acknowledged that two of its data centers in the UAE had taken direct impacts from unmanned aerial vehicles, while a facility in Bahrain suffered collateral damage from a nearby explosion during the onset of military conflicts involving Iran. Cloud administrators had previously instructed affected enterprise clients to migrate workloads out of the region while cautioning that regional cloud operations would remain volatile.

Responsibility for the attacks was claimed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which stated that the Bahrain data hub was targeted due to Amazon's commercial and technical partnerships with the United States military.

The inability to recover physical hardware or enterprise data highlights growing operational risks for major cloud computing vendors expanding into the Persian Gulf. The region has attracted tens of billions of dollars in digital infrastructure spending to support global demands driven by artificial intelligence workloads.

The security vulnerabilities have already begun altering major technology investments across the Middle East. In May 2025, prominent technology firms including OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle, and Cisco signed on as foundational partners for UAE Stargate, an ambitious 10-square-mile computing installation designed for 5 gigawatts of power capacity. Following the recent strikes, project planners are considering decentralizing the facility's footprint across multiple geographic regions and adding defensive countermeasures such as blast-proof concrete, subterranean server bays, and active missile defense systems, according to reporting from Reuters.

AWS reiterated its intention to continue offering service to organizations operating within the Gulf region. The platform indicated that further operational status updates regarding its UAE sites will be shared in the coming months, while an update regarding its Bahrain infrastructure is scheduled for early 2027.