Iranian military strikes have rendered Amazon Web Services availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai “hard down,” forcing the company to advise customers to migrate workloads to other regions.

Key Points

• Internal Amazon communications confirm that infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai is suffering from extended outages and reduced redundancy.
• The Bahrain facility sustained multiple hits, including a Wednesday strike that resulted in a fire at the site.
• Amazon has instructed employees to deprioritize these regions and scale services to the minimal footprint required for customer migration.
• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has issued threats against other major U.S. technology companies, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
• Amazon has not provided a specific timeline for when operations in the affected Gulf regions will return to normal.

Why it Matters

These disruptions highlight the increasing vulnerability of critical cloud infrastructure to geopolitical conflict and direct military targeting. As major tech firms face threats from state actors, businesses relying on these services must now account for significant regional instability when planning their data redundancy and disaster recovery strategies.