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and UAE raises resilience questionsMuhammad Zulhusni18th September 2026 Share this story: Tags:AIAWScloudcybersecuritydatadata centreDisaster RecoveryCategories::Big VendorsCloud ComputingCloud in ActionFeaturesFuture of CloudMissteps & LessonsMulti- & Hybrid CloudStrategy & Decision-MakingAWS has said it cannot restore access to some resources and data in Bahrain and one Availability Zone in the UAE after physical damage affected its cloud infrastructure.In a September 15 update, AWS said it had exhausted its options for restoring data and resources that had not been migrated before its Middle East (Bahrain) Region became unavailable.In the UAE, it said it cannot restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in Availability Zone mec1-az2.AWS’s Bahrain Region, identified as me-south-1, contains three Availability Zones.The outages date back to March, when AWS infrastructure in Bahrain and the UAE was damaged during strikes.AWS updates cited by Reuters said the incidents caused physical damage to cloud infrastructure and disrupted services in both countries.After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged, AWS advised customers to move workloads to other Regions.
Most customers had migrated before damage to a second Availability Zone in April made the Bahrain Region unavailable, according to Reuters.AWS subsequently assessed the affected Bahrain infrastructure and said it exhausted its options for restoring resources and data that had not been moved before the region became unavailable.Remaining customers have been supported in restoring operations elsewhere using available backups or other recovery methods.In the UAE, AWS’s Middle East Region, identified as me-central-1, also contains three Availability Zones.AWS said it cannot restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in mec1-az2.It is continuing to recover resources across the wider UAE Region and its other affected Availability Zones, while supporting customers in re-establishing operations in alternative Regions using available backups or other recovery measures.The outages also affected services outside AWS.
Reuters reported that banking operations were among the services disrupted when the incidents began in March.Multi-AZ and multi-Region resilienceAWS distinguishes between high availability across multiple Availability Zones and disaster recovery for failures affecting an entire Region.Its Well-Architected guidance recommends multi-AZ architectures for disruptions affecting individual zones, while workloads that need protection from wider failures can use disaster-recovery strategies across Regions.AWS says Availability Zones are physically separate locations within a Region, with independent infrastructure including power, networking, and mechanical systems.Workloads distributed across multiple zones can continue operating when infrastructure in one zone fails, provided the application and services are configured for that level of resilience.AWS said the Bahrain damage spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services were designed to withstand.
AWS’s architecture guidance separately recommends considering multi-Region disaster recovery when workloads require protection against failures affecting an entire Region.Cross-Region protection requires separate configuration.AWS Backup allows supported backups to be copied into another Region on demand or through scheduled backup plans, including where business-continuity or compliance requirements call for geographic separation between production data and recovery copies.AWS also distinguishes replication from backup in its disaster-recovery guidance.It recommends backing up replicated data at the recovery site so organisations retain point-in-time recovery options instead of relying only on replicas that continuously reflect changes made to production data.Disaster recovery is a shared responsibilityAWS’s shared-responsibility model separates responsibility for the underlying cloud infrastructure from responsibility for workload-level resilience.
AWS manages the resilience of the infrastructure supporting its services, while customers are responsible for configuring their workloads to meet their own recovery requirements.For Amazon EC2, AWS says customers are responsible for deploying instances across appropriate locations, configuring recovery mechanisms, and designing resilient applications.For managed services including Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, AWS manages the underlying infrastructure and platform, while customers remain responsible for their data-resilience strategy, including backup, versioning, and replication.AWS says most workloads can meet their resilience requirements within a single Region using multiple Availability Zones.Workloads that require protection from Region-wide disruption need to assess whether a multi-Region architecture is appropriate.Disaster-recovery planning is also tied to recovery objectives.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines how long a system can remain unavailable before affecting business operations, while Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines the point in time to which data must be restored following an outage.AWS documents several disaster-recovery approaches for meeting those objectives, including backup and restore, standby configurations, and multi-Region active-active deployments.Each involves different infrastructure requirements, recovery times, operational complexity, and costs.A backup-and-restore model keeps recovery copies without maintaining a complete duplicate production environment.Standby and active-active designs maintain more infrastructure in the recovery location, reducing the work required during failover but increasing the resources needed to operate the environment.AWS Prescriptive Guidance notes that a fully provisioned standby Region with infrastructure comparable to the primary Region can roughly double infrastructure costs.
Multi-Region deployments also require organisations to manage dependencies, failover and failback processes, and recovery testing.Data-residency requirements can also affect where recovery infrastructure is placed.AWS guidance says some organisations must keep regulated data within defined geographic boundaries, which can limit the use of conventional cross-Region disaster recovery.In guidance published in August this year, AWS said sectors including government, financial services, healthcare, power, and utilities can face restrictions on where critical data and recovery infrastructure are located.AWS outlined options including encrypted replication where permitted, in-country recovery infrastructure using AWS Outposts, and recovery environments outside AWS.AWS has not provided a date for restoring operations in its Bahrain Region.
The company said it plans to issue another update on Bahrain in early 2027, while recovery work continues in the UAE.See also: UAE redesigns 5GW AI data centre plan around physical securityWant to learn more about Cloud Computing from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London.The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.CloudTech News is powered by TechForge Media.Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.About the Author Muhammad ZulhusniJournalist As a tech journalist, Zul focuses on topics including cloud computing, cybersecurity, and disruptive technology in the enterprise industry.
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