Amazon Web Services’ cloud region in Bahrain has sustained damage in a second Iranian strike, the Financial Times reported on 2 April, citing a person familiar with the matter, as the conflict’s reach into the Gulf’s digital infrastructure deepens with each passing week.
Bahrain’s Interior Ministry confirmed that civil defence teams were extinguishing a fire at a company facility following what authorities described as an Iranian attack, without naming the company involved. The FT subsequently identified the facility as belonging to AWS. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
The strike came a day after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards issued an explicit threat to target US technology companies operating in the Middle East, naming Microsoft, Google and Apple alongside Amazon. The warning translated into direct action within 24 hours, marking a significant escalation in the deliberate targeting of named civilian commercial infrastructure.
This is the second confirmed disruption to AWS Bahrain in a month. The company disclosed the previous week that its Bahrain region had been “disrupted” amid the regional conflict. Separately, drone strikes on AWS facilities in the UAE caused extended outages in early March, cutting banking, payments and cloud-dependent services for millions of residents across the Emirates.
AWS operates as Amazon’s primary profit driver and provides cloud infrastructure for government entities, financial institutions and enterprise customers across the Gulf. Bahrain hosts one of three AWS cloud regions in the Middle East alongside UAE and Israel, with a Saudi Arabia region under development.
The pattern of repeat strikes on the same operator’s infrastructure across multiple Gulf markets signals a deliberate campaign against US hyperscaler presence in the region rather than opportunistic collateral damage. For cloud operators, insurers and sovereign technology planners across the MEA region, the Bahrain strike raises a question that no commercial architecture review has previously needed to address: how many times can a hyperscale region absorb a direct hit before customers begin relocating workloads entirely.
