AWS Wrote Off a Bahrain Region and One UAE Zone. Here Is What That Means.

AWS has stopped trying to bring part of its Middle East footprint back. The write-off is the story, not the outage.

• AWS completed its assessment and told customers it cannot restore resources and data hosted only in Bahrain, the me-south-1 region.
• The same applies to a single UAE zone, mec1-az2, in the me-central-1 region. Work continues on the other two UAE zones.
• In Bahrain the damage spanned multiple availability zones, which AWS says exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.
• The first Bahrain zone was hit in March 2026 and AWS told customers to migrate out. A second went down in April and the region became unavailable.
• Reporting records two of the three UAE zones significantly impaired and two UAE facilities directly struck. AWS promises a Bahrain update in early 2027.

The lesson is narrow and old. An availability zone spread buys uptime inside one region. It is not a copy. The assessment retires a comfortable assumption about multi-AZ resilience, and the audit it implies is small. Find what you run in exactly one region with no copy anywhere else, then check whether a copy may leave.

Read the full analysis.