AWS CEO: Teams Operating Around the Clock Following Drone Attacks on Cloud Infrastructure

TLDR

• Drone strikes connected to the Iran conflict damaged AWS data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
• AWS CEO Matt Garman stated that teams are working around the clock to maintain the availability of regional infrastructure.
• Numerous AWS services in both Middle Eastern regions are still not accessible.
• Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy asserted that it had targeted Amazon’s infrastructure in Bahrain.
• Increasing energy costs and helium supply challenges are putting additional pressure on operations.

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(SeaPRwire) –   Amazon’s (AMZN) stock increased by 3.68%, gaining $7.87 in after-hours trading, as the wider market processed news of significant disruptions to its cloud infrastructure division.

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Amazon Web Services is striving to keep its Middle East operations running after drone strikes damaged its data centers in Bahrain and the UAE. These strikes are associated with the ongoing Iran conflict, which intensified in February.

AWS CEO Matt Garman spoke directly about the situation at the HumanX conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. “It’s a really difficult situation, and we’re working incredibly hard,” he told CNBC. “We have teams, 24/7, working to make sure that we can keep our infrastructure up for our customers in that region.”

According to AWS’s official status page, many services in the Bahrain and UAE regions are still offline. Last week, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy declared that it had specifically targeted Amazon’s data center infrastructure in Bahrain. AWS chose not to comment on that announcement but referenced an earlier statement confirming that the Bahrain region “has been disrupted as a result of the ongoing conflict.”

Services Still Down Across Two Regions

Fixing the disruption won’t happen quickly. AWS launched its Bahrain region in 2019 and its UAE region in 2022; both were constructed to meet the rising demand for cloud services throughout the Middle East, catering to government bodies and financial organizations among others.

The extent of the outage is placing significant pressure on enterprise clients that selected these regions due to data residency requirements. Many businesses operate in the Middle East precisely because local laws mandate that data remain within national boundaries; switching operations to Europe or Asia (a multi-region failover) isn’t always legally permissible.

The conflict is also impacting costs. Energy prices in the region have risen since hostilities started in February. Data centers, particularly those handling generative AI tasks, consume large amounts of energy. Helium, a critical component in semiconductor production, has also become more difficult to obtain. Qatar, located near the Strait of Hormuz, produces over one-third of the world’s helium supply, and transit through the strait has been limited.

On Monday, President Trump warned of strikes on civilian infrastructure if Iran fails to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices to surge.

AWS Still Committed to the Region

In spite of the disruption, Garman took a balanced approach when discussing the long-term prospects.

“There’s a fantastic entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. “There’s a willingness to invest. And so our and my excitement about investing long term in that region is just as strong as it’s ever been.”

Google, Microsoft, and Oracle all run or are constructing competing data centers in the Middle East. All of them face the same challenge: how to ensure continuous operation (uptime) when physical infrastructure is threatened by military activity.

An AWS spokesperson confirmed the outage in Bahrain but did not provide a timeline for complete recovery. As of Tuesday afternoon, the company’s status page still lists multiple services as unavailable in both the Bahrain and UAE regions.