--- title: AWS still cannot restore Bahrain region or UAE... description: Six months after drone strikes damaged Amazon data centre sites in Bahrain and the UAE in early March 2026, AWS still cannot restore its Bahrain region or the... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AWS still cannot restore Bahrain region or UAE availability zone six months after drone strikes | daily.dev og:description: Six months after drone strikes damaged Amazon data centre sites in Bahrain and the UAE in early March 2026, AWS still cannot restore its Bahrain region or the... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/X2qnHAo8x.png og:image:alt: AWS still cannot restore Bahrain region or UAE availability zone six months after drone strikes og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AWS still cannot restore Bahrain region or UAE availability zone six months after drone strikes **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Six months after drone strikes damaged Amazon data centre sites in Bahrain and the UAE in early March 2026, AWS still cannot restore its Bahrain region or the mec1-az2 Availability Zone in the UAE. About 60 services in Bahrain went down by end of April, and AWS has stopped billing affected regions while urging customers to migrate and rebuild from off-site backups. Data that existed only in the affected zone or region cannot be restored, and a Bahrain recovery timeline isn't expected until early 2027. The incident has revived debate over the shared responsibility model, including a resurfaced claim that customers 'wouldn't notice' a data centre being destroyed, and highlighted how data residency laws in some countries can prevent customers from maintaining cross-region backups, raising broader doubts about the Gulf as an AI data centre hub. ## Content Six months after drone strikes hit Amazon's data centre sites in Bahrain and the UAE in early March 2026, AWS has confirmed it still cannot restore access to its Bahrain region or one of the three UAE Availability Zones (mec1-az2). The damage in Bahrain spanned multiple Availability Zones simultaneously - more than what AWS's regional and multi-AZ redundancy design was built to handle. Around 60 services in the region were down by end of April. AWS has since stopped billing for the affected regions and urged customers to migrate elsewhere and rebuild from off-site backups. For Bahrain specifically, AWS says it's replacing affected infrastructure and expects to share a recovery timeline in early 2027 - prompting at least one developer to note, drily, that "2027 down" is a new category of outage. The harder question is what happened to customer data. AWS has confirmed it cannot restore data that existed *only* in mec1-az2 or exclusively within the Bahrain region. Whether that data is permanently lost, and whether the buildings will be repaired or replaced, remains unclear. This has reopened a pointed debate about the shared responsibility model. A 2025 interview resurfaced in which an AWS leader claimed customers "wouldn't notice" a data centre being destroyed - a claim that looks different now. Multi-AZ redundancy was never formally marketed as protection against coordinated physical strikes across an entire region, but the gap between how resilience was implied and what actually happened is hard to ignore. There's also a structural problem that the incident exposed: data residency laws in some countries prohibit copying data outside national borders, which means customers who were legally compliant may have had no way to maintain the cross-region backups that would have saved them here. The shared responsibility model assumes customers *can* back up elsewhere. That assumption doesn't always hold. More broadly, the incident adds to growing doubts about the Gulf as a hub for AI data centre investment, where the combination of geopolitical risk and legal constraints on data movement creates a resilience problem that redundant availability zones alone can't solve. ## Questions this post answers ### Can AWS restore data that was only stored in the Bahrain region after the 2026 drone strikes? No, AWS has confirmed it cannot restore data that existed only in mec1-az2 or exclusively within the Bahrain region. The drone strikes damaged multiple Availability Zones simultaneously, exceeding what AWS's regional and multi-AZ redundancy design was built to withstand. AWS has stopped billing for the affected regions and is urging customers to migrate and rebuild from off-site backups. _Teams rethinking multi-region backup strategy after this outage can track cloud resilience coverage on daily.dev._ ### When will AWS restore the Bahrain region after the drone strike damage? AWS says it is replacing the affected infrastructure and expects to share a recovery timeline only in early 2027, roughly a year after the March 2026 drone strikes. Around 60 services in the region were already down by the end of April, and no firm restoration date has been given. _Engineers planning around extended cloud outages can follow AWS infrastructure updates on daily.dev._ ### Why couldn't some AWS customers in Bahrain maintain cross-region backups before the outage? Data residency laws in some countries legally prohibit copying data outside national borders, so customers who were compliant with those laws had no way to maintain the cross-region backups that could have protected them from the regional data loss. This exposes a gap in AWS's shared responsibility model, which assumes customers can always back up elsewhere. _Architects weighing compliance against resilience tradeoffs can follow this debate on daily.dev._ ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@trevorsuna** · 0 upvotes > This is a hard reminder to test recovery against a whole-region loss, including whether backups can legally live elsewhere. When residency rules prevent a cross-region copy, teams need to make that recovery limit explicit in their plans instead of assuming multi-AZ coverage answers it. ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [What happens when the cloud blows up?](https://daily.dev/posts/what-happens-when-the-cloud-blows-up--hppqgjaf9) · InfoWorld · 26 upvotes · 1 comments - [Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers](https://daily.dev/posts/amazon-stuck-with-months-of-repairs-after-drone-strikes-on-data-centers-ofouo7xfa) · Hacker News · 17 upvotes · 2 comments - [War in Iran Damages Multiple AWS Data Centers, Challenging Multi-AZ Assumptions](https://daily.dev/posts/war-in-iran-damages-multiple-aws-data-centers-challenging-multi-az-assumptions-wx7xfchku) · InfoQ · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Iranian missile blitz takes down AWS data centers in Bahrain and Dubai — Amazon reportedly declares “hard down” status for multiple zones](https://daily.dev/posts/iranian-missile-blitz-takes-down-aws-data-centers-in-bahrain-and-dubai-amazon-reportedly-declares--xuomtve27) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#cloud](https://daily.dev/tags/cloud), [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AWS still cannot restore Bahrain region or UAE availability zone six months after drone strikes","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x"},"datePublished":"2026-09-21T08:52:11.267Z","dateModified":"2026-09-21T08:53:25.233Z","description":"Six months after drone strikes damaged Amazon data centre sites in Bahrain and the UAE in early March 2026, AWS still cannot restore its Bahrain region or the...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/284c76c17a253f44fb6a1529c32aa82f?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/284c76c17a253f44fb6a1529c32aa82f?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Collections","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Collections","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--fk_6ycEi--/f_auto,q_auto/v1780996001/logos/collections?_a=BAMAMiWQ0","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":1},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"cloud,aws","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Collections","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/collections"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"AWS still cannot restore Bahrain region or UAE availability zone six months after drone strikes"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/aws-still-cannot-restore-bahrain-region-or-uae-availability-zone-six-months-after-drone-strikes-x2qnhao8x","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"This is a hard reminder to test recovery against a whole-region loss, including whether backups can legally live elsewhere. 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