The outage has sent shock waves across the digital ecosystem and the root cause, a DNS resolution failure in the US East region, has exposed the fragility of global infrastructure built on centralised cloud systems, said a Bahrain-based technology executive.
The incident reignites urgent conversations around multi-cloud strategies, digital resilience and the need for transparent contingency planning in an increasingly interconnected world, Hilal Technology Chief Operating Officer Mahmoud Abbas said yesterday.
He stressed that it was a wake-up call for Gulf-based startups and enterprises to diversify cloud strategies and strengthen digital resilience.
Transparency and rapid recovery are essential, but so is proactive planning, Mr Abbas highlighted.
He pointed out that although Bahrain’s AWS infrastructure, launched in 2022 as part of the Middle East (Bahrain), wasn’t the epicentre, many services hosted globally but accessed locally were affected.
Applications like Zoom, Snapchat and Amazon itself experienced downtime due to dependencies on US-East infrastructure.
“The incident highlights the importance of multi-region failover strategies for Bahraini enterprises. Relying solely on one AWS region – even if it’s local – can expose systems to global outages,” Mr Abbas said.
GDN Media’s Assistant Editor Sharad Sapehiya, who helps manage the GDNonline editorial operation, said: “Users of several popular websites in Bahrain were left stumped, just like many others across the world, due to the AWS outage.
“Operations at the GDN were also briefly affected as some online services we use to create content and deliver news were down. However, we quickly switched to alternative options that were still functional,” Mr Sapehiya said.
“This incident has certainly raised a valid concern about the risks of so many companies relying on a single provider for cloud hosting.”
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