Amazon Web Services cloud computing operations in Bahrain sustained damage in an Iranian strike on April 1, 2026, according to a report by the Financial Times citing a person familiar with the matter. The attack marks the second confirmed physical strike on Amazon’s regional cloud infrastructure in less than a month, deepening concerns about the vulnerability of commercial technology assets in the Gulf as the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran continues to escalate beyond conventional military targets. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry confirmed that civil defence teams were extinguishing a fire at a company facility following what authorities described as an Iranian attack, though the ministry did not identify the company involved or provide details on casualties or the extent of the damage.
According to multiple reports, the strike hit facilities linked to Bahrain Telecommunications Company, the country’s largest telecom operator, which hosts and supports cloud infrastructure used by AWS in the kingdom. Amazon declined to comment on any specific strike, directing questions to comments issued following previous attacks. The reported damage to the Bahrain facility comes a day after Iran’s Revolutionary Guards explicitly threatened to target major United States technology companies operating in the Middle East, naming Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Apple among their potential targets in retaliation for ongoing military operations against Iran.
The April 1 strike is not the first time Amazon’s Bahrain infrastructure has come under fire. Amazon confirmed on March 2 that two data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain sustained physical impacts from drone strikes. AWS launched its Middle East Bahrain Region in July 2019 as its first cloud region in the Middle East, consisting of three Availability Zones serving customers seeking lower-latency cloud infrastructure across the region. As of the time of the April 1 incident, the AWS Health Dashboard still showed unresolved service disruptions from the earlier March attacks, with 34 out of 39 impacted AWS services in Bahrain marked as resolved and 25 services in the UAE still listed as disrupted. AWS underpins a wide range of critical services including e-commerce platforms, financial systems, media streaming, and government digital operations, making disruptions to its Gulf infrastructure a matter of concern well beyond the immediate physical damage at the affected sites.
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