- Sources: AWS newsroom statement, AWS Health Dashboard, The Register, HN 49033240
- Summary: The AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region,
me-south-1, which opened in July 2019 as Amazon's first cloud region in the Middle East, is listed as unavailable on the AWS Health Dashboard. AWS states the region was disrupted by the ongoing regional conflict, that it is working with local authorities, and that many customers have already relocated. Its guidance is for customers with workloads in the region to migrate to alternate AWS Regions, recover from remote backups held in other Regions, and enact disaster-recovery plans. Reporting on the AWS Health Dashboard states billing in the region is suspended and that restoration is expected to take months. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed via state media that it struck the AWS infrastructure with cruise missiles on 2026-07-21 in response to alleged US strikes on a nuclear site. The destruction claim was not independently verified. - Why it matters: An entire cloud region being unavailable for months removes any in-region recovery path for workloads pinned to
me-south-1, forcing cross-region migration and disaster recovery, and it is the first time a major cloud provider has lost a full region to physical damage. - Follow-up: Watch for a restoration timeline, the scope of any data loss, independent verification of the cause, and an AWS post-incident summary.
send feedback on this story