The whole point of AWS Availability Zones (AZ) is that if one location goes out, you still have data elsewhere and it would automagically recover. The default for services in one Region is 3 AZs. Some regions like us-east-1 have 6 AZs.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/

From their own map, it looks like both Bahrain and UAE had 3 AZs.

https://builder.aws.com/content/3ADBRZtN2DSQEgLOa3ga88M4dnx/how-many-azs-you-need-to-deploy-to-in-prod-environment

Amazon also recommends storing data across at least 3 AZs to avoid data loss.

So either customers actively turned off multi-AZ support, someone screwed up the local installation, or EVERY single one of those AZs got hit.

Edit: article is paywalled, but there's a small section that says multiple AWS locations were hit in Bahrain.

Could be either honestly. I always hated how AWS did their multi-region setup, where it's basically a whole separate account. So difficult to do multi region setups. GCP and Azure both made that much much easier. For this exact reason, I don't really trust AZs. They're all too close together still. I want the data replicated around the planet.

Tapes offsite? Nah, we go fast and break things here!