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Amazon's Bahrain data center targeted by Iran for support of U.S. military, state media says

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Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeted Amazon’s Bahrain data center, citing its alleged support for U.S. military and intelligence operations, according to state media reports. The attack followed joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran over the weekend. A drone strike near Bahrain’s facility caused structural damage, while two UAE data centers were directly hit, leaving all three offline. Power disruptions and water damage from firefighting efforts exacerbated the outages. AWS confirmed elevated error rates and degraded service availability, advising customers to back up data and migrate workloads away from Bahrain and the UAE. Popular applications were impacted by the disruptions. Amazon’s Bahrain region, launched in 2019, hosts critical government workloads. The company ordered Middle East employees to work remotely amid escalating regional instability. The incident underscores growing risks to cloud infrastructure in geopolitical conflicts, with Iran retaliating against U.S. and Israeli bases across the Gulf.
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In this articleAmazon's data center in Bahrain was targeted by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the company's support of the U.S. military, Iranian state media said Wednesday. The company's cloud computing unit said Monday that one of its facilities in Bahrain was damaged due to a nearby drone strike on Sunday. Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were also damaged after they were "directly struck" by drones. All of the facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard.The attack in Bahrain was launched "to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy's military and intelligence activities," Iran's Fars News Agency said on Telegram. The incidents came after joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran over the weekend. Iran has retaliated against Israeli and U.S. bases across the Gulf.Amazon declined to comment. In addition to structural damage, the data centers also experienced power disruptions and some water damage after firefighters worked to put out sparks and fire. Some popular AWS applications experienced "elevated error rates and degraded availability" due to the incident.AWS advised cloud customers to back up their data, consider migrating their workloads to other regions and direct traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.AWS announced its Bahrain region in 2019, and it hosts significant workloads for governments there. The company also operates a corporate office in Bahrain that is primarily for AWS employees. Earlier this week, Amazon instructed all of its corporate employees in the Middle East to work remotely and "follow local government guidelines" amid escalating instability in the region. Got a confidential news tip? We want to hear from you.Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inboxGet this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services.© 2026 Versant Media, LLC.

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