AWS has written off the customer data that lived only in its Bahrain region

An availability zone, in AWS's own documentation, is one or more discrete data centers inside a region, and that documentation lists three zones in Bahrain and three in the UAE ^[8]. The structure exists to contain localized equipment failures, power problems and natural disasters ^[9]. What hit it was several facilities in one geographic area: two UAE data centers struck directly, and a nearby strike that damaged infrastructure in Bahrain ^[10]. Structural damage and power disruption followed, along with water damage caused by fire-suppression work, according to the Associated Press ^[11]. The Stack described the attacks as Iranian strikes ^[20].

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," AWS said in its Bahrain update ^[12]. Multi-AZ deployment buys uptime through the loss of a data center. The loss of a metropolitan area is past what it covers. For an event that disables an entire region AWS recommends cross-region recovery, and its resiliency guidance leaves backups, replication and multi-zone deployment for the customer to configure ^[13].

Some customers moved data out of Bahrain after the March attacks, and a second disruption in April took the region out entirely; The Stack wrote that customers who moved slowly are out of luck ^[5]. The gap between the two events was a matter of weeks ^[22]. A plan whose first step is to copy the estate elsewhere once the notice arrives has to run at full data volume over a damaged region's remaining capacity, while every other tenant is trying to do the same thing.

The Bahrain region opened in July 2019 with three availability zones, and the UAE region in August 2022 with three ^[21]. Cross-region copies add cost, operational work and data-governance questions, and a startup can reasonably decide duplicate infrastructure elsewhere is excessive for an unlikely regional event ^[15]. Regulated tenants have the reverse problem: banks, governments and others may be required to keep data locally, which leaves fewer options for geographic separation ^[14]. For those customers the cross-region recommendation and the residency rule cannot both be satisfied inside one country's footprint.

Amazon reported $128.7 billion in AWS sales and $45.6 billion in AWS operating income for 2025, against $80 billion in operating income across Amazon ^[16], so roughly 57 percent of the company's operating income came from the cloud division ^[17]. A regional loss of undisclosed size does not move that. The September post was AWS's first public account of the recovery effort since April, about five months earlier ^[18][19].