AWS Confirms Permanent Data Loss After Damage to Bahrain and UAE Data Centers

Amazon Web Services has acknowledged that some customer data and resources were permanently lost after Iranian drone strikes damaged multiple data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. According to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15, the company was unable to restore access to certain resources hosted in the affected facilities despite spending approximately six months attempting to recover them.

In the United Arab Emirates region, the permanent loss was limited to one of the three availability zones, identified as mec1-az2. AWS said it continues to work on recovering regional resources and restoring services in the other two availability zones. The situation in Bahrain was more extensive: Amazon reported that it could not restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones in that region.

AWS stated that the infrastructure damage extended across multiple availability zones and exceeded the level of disruption its regional and multi-availability-zone services were designed to withstand. The company had suspended customer billing in both affected regions and previously urged customers to migrate their workloads to other geographic regions and rely on remote backups.

The incident highlights the limits of cloud-provider redundancy when a large-scale disaster affects several facilities in the same region. Customers that had not maintained independent, geographically separated backups or replication may have no way to recover their data. AWS reportedly issued approximately $150 million in customer credits after the strikes, but credits cannot replace information that was irretrievably destroyed. The event demonstrates that cloud services do not eliminate the customer’s responsibility for disaster recovery and backup planning.