Amazon Web Services has officially given up trying to recover data that existed exclusively in its Bahrain and UAE data centers, following Iranian military strikes that occurred during the ongoing war that began in February 2026.
In updated availability reports published on September 16, AWS stated: "After thorough situation assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in these Availability Zones." The affected zones are all three Bahrain data centers (mes1-az1, mes1-az2, mes1-az3) and one of three in the UAE (mec1-az2). Customers who stored data only in these zones are being directed to their own backups.
AWS said it is working on rebuilding destroyed infrastructure in the UAE and will share details in coming months. The future of Bahrain operations remains unclear; AWS says it will comment on that next year.
The losses are significant. AWS generated 18% of Amazon's total revenue in 2025 but contributed more than half of the company's operating profit. The cloud division has also been growing faster than Amazon's overall business in recent years.
The incident represents an unprecedented case of wartime military action directly destroying commercial cloud infrastructure, raising urgent questions about data sovereignty, geopolitical risk for cloud customers, and the physical security of distributed computing systems in conflict zones.
