Iran claims new missile strike on AWS infrastructure in Bahrain
The IRGC says it hit Amazon cloud infrastructure in Bahrain, where AWS service status has already shown prolonged outages tied to the US-Iran conflict.
By Renata Fuchs · Policy Reporter
· 3 min read
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Tuesday that it attacked Amazon Web Services infrastructure in Bahrain with several cruise missiles, claiming retaliation for a U.S. strike on Iran’s under-construction Darkhovin nuclear facility. AWS has not disclosed damage details, customer exposure, or a recovery timeline, and The Register reported that Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
The IRGC statement, translated through Google Translate, said AWS’s central data infrastructure had been destroyed and framed the attack as a response to what it called U.S. military action. The claim is difficult to verify independently because AWS services in Bahrain were already offline before the latest statement, according to the public AWS Health Dashboard.
AWS’s dashboard shows continuing trouble in two Middle East regions. The me-south-1 region in Bahrain is listed as currently unavailable, while me-central-1 in the UAE is described as unable to reliably support customer applications. Both sets of issues are attributed on the dashboard to the U.S.-Iran conflict.
The public status record also indicates that AWS’s Bahrain region has been down for months. The last update in the open issues section for Bahrain and the UAE was dated April 30, and the Service History tab shows every listed AWS service in Bahrain as offline over that period.
A second claim against already damaged cloud infrastructure
Iranian state-affiliated media previously said attacks on AWS sites in Bahrain and the UAE were intentional after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February. After those attacks, AWS-hosted vendors including Snowflake and Red Hat told affected customers to fail over or shift workloads into other regions, according to prior reporting.
AWS also waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 in its UAE me-central-1 region following the attacks on its infrastructure. The company did not disclose the dollar value of those credits, the number of affected customers, or the full operational impact across the two regions.
For cloud buyers and operators, the notable issue is less the IRGC’s new claim than the length of the outage already visible in AWS’s own service records. A full regional outage lasting months is a severe failure mode for customers that treated local availability zones as sufficient resilience. The source material does not state whether AWS had offered customer-specific remediation beyond regional failover guidance and usage-charge relief in the UAE.
Iran has also reportedly designated facilities tied to Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Palantir as valid targets for retaliation, citing alleged support for U.S. military operations. Those claims have not been accompanied here by disclosed technical evidence, specific facility locations or confirmation from the companies named.
The cloud industry has spent years selling regions and availability zones as the architecture for reliability and compliance. The Bahrain outage shows a different risk profile: geopolitical targeting of physical cloud infrastructure, where redundancy helps only if customers have already built and tested cross-region operations outside the affected area.
This story draws on original reporting from The Register.
