AWS says UAE, Bahrain data centers cannot restart

Amazon Web Services said several data centers in Bahrain and one in the United Arab Emirates that were hit by drone strikes in March cannot be restarted.

AWS said Tuesday that it was unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in the affected region. The company said it had exhausted every option for restoring data and resources in Bahrain that had not been migrated before the region became unavailable.

The company said it was still working to restore resources at two sites in the UAE. AWS said most customers affected by the UAE disruption had been able to re-establish operations in other regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible.

AWS said in early March that drone strikes damaged two of its data centers in the UAE and a facility in Bahrain. At the time, it said the incidents were “a result of the ongoing conflict” in the Middle East. The strikes occurred a few days after the United States and Israel began attacking Iran.

AWS is Amazon's cloud computing arm and competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in providing infrastructure used by apps, websites and generative AI services.