Amazon Web Services' Bahrain region has been disrupted following drone activity, the company confirmed on Monday, marking the second time the ME-SOUTH-1 region has been struck since the conflict between Iran, the US and Israel began in late February.
Amazon said it is helping to migrate customers to alternate AWS regions while it works to recover, but did not disclose the extent of the damage or provide a timeline for full restoration. "As this situation evolves and, as we have advised before, we request those with workloads in the affected regions continue to migrate to other locations," the company said in a statement to Reuters, which first reported the disruption.
The downstream impact on Gulf fintechs is already visible. Hubpay, the UAE-based payments platform, emailed customers on Monday morning to confirm that its business app and web portal are affected, with users unable to receive one-time passwords for login. The company attributed the issue to "a regional outage impacting Amazon Web Services infrastructure in Bahrain" and said accounts and funds remain unaffected, with transactions already in progress continuing to be processed. Hubpay was also among the platforms that went down during the first AWS outage on March 1.
Hubpay email sent to customers on 24 March 2026
The incident comes just three weeks after drone strikes on March 1 directly hit two AWS facilities in the UAE and caused physical damage to infrastructure in Bahrain, triggering what became one of the most severe cloud outages in the region's history. FWDstart reported at the time that the initial outage knocked at least 38 cloud services offline in the UAE and over 50 in Bahrain, taking down banking apps, fintech platforms and consumer services across the Gulf. Sarwa, Stake, Careem, Alaan, HubPay, Liv by Emirates NBD and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank all reported disruptions.
AWS confirmed after that first incident that the damage was caused by drone strikes. "In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure," the company said at the time. The strikes caused structural damage, power outages and water damage from fire suppression systems.
The initial outage challenged a foundational assumption of cloud architecture: that distributing workloads across multiple availability zones within a region provides adequate redundancy against localised failures. When two of three availability zones in the UAE were impaired simultaneously, and Bahrain experienced its own disruption on the same day, AWS ended up advising customers to move workloads to entirely different global regions, an outcome the multi-AZ model is designed to prevent.
The fact that Bahrain has now been hit a second time will intensify pressure on Gulf-based businesses to reconsider single-region architectures. AWS's own guidance since the first incident has been to migrate workloads out of the Middle East where possible, but for many regulated entities, particularly banks and government services, data residency requirements make that difficult or legally impermissible.
As one senior cloud architect noted after the first incident, moving workloads to other regions during a crisis may restore service but risks moving sensitive data outside national borders.
Google, Microsoft and Oracle all operate data centre facilities in Gulf states that have been under bombardment from Iranian forces, though only AWS has so far reported outages linked to the conflict.
