Image Courtesy: Planet Labs PBC
Amazon Web Services has confirmed that some customer data stored in its Middle Eastern cloud infrastructure is permanently unrecoverable, six months after Iranian strikes severely damaged data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
AWS said it exhausted its recovery options for resources stored exclusively in one of its three availability zones in the UAE, known as mec1-az2. The company is still replacing damaged infrastructure and attempting to recover regional resources from the UAE’s other two zones. The extent of the permanent losses was detailed in a September 15 AWS update, according to Ars Technica.
The situation is more severe in Bahrain. AWS said it could not restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones in the country. The company acknowledged that the physical damage stretched across multiple zones and exceeded the failures its regional and multi-zone systems were designed to handle.
The first Iranian drone strikes hit AWS facilities in Bahrain and the UAE on March 1, shortly after the US-Israeli attacks on Iran began on February 28. AWS urged affected customers to move workloads to other regions and recover inaccessible resources from remote backups. The company also reportedly issued about $150 million in customer credits following the attacks.
Bahrain’s infrastructure was hit again in April, disrupting another availability zone. By then, AWS said most affected customers had followed its recommendation to migrate their workloads elsewhere.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps carried out another strike on July 24, targeting a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain. Satellite imagery subsequently confirmed damage to the facility.
The incident highlights an unusual vulnerability in cloud computing. Availability zones are designed to isolate infrastructure failures within a region, but simultaneous physical destruction across several zones can overwhelm those protections. Customers without geographically separate backups can therefore remain exposed to catastrophic data loss.
AWS has suspended billing for customers affected in the damaged regions while recovery work continues. The company says it remains committed to its Bahrain operations and plans to provide another update in early 2027.
