AWS Says Iranian Attacks Permanently Destroyed Customer Data in Bahrain and the UAE

Six months after Iranian drone and missile attacks damaged multiple Amazon Web Services data centers, AWS has acknowledged that some customer data stored in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates was permanently lost.

AWS “failed to restore access to resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged facilities, according to an update posted on September 15. The AWS dashboard update was first reported by Reuters, which said the Iranian attack caused catastrophic damage to the data centers.

Some UAE customer data is irrecoverable

AWS said that one in three affected cases resulted in the irrecoverable loss of customer data in the UAE region’s mec1-az2 Availability Zone. Each Availability Zone is served by one or more Amazon data centers.

The company is still working on “regional resource recovery” and attempting to restore resources hosted in two other UAE Availability Zones. AWS said it was replacing “affected infrastructure” and would provide customers with further updates on service restoration in the coming months.

AWS could not restore Bahrain resources and data

The disruption appears to have been more extensive in Bahrain. Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three Availability Zones in the region.

“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded the limits that our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” AWS said in its update.

AWS has stopped billing customers in the affected Bahrain and UAE regions and has spent the past six months working to restore normal operations.

Timeline of the attacks on AWS data centers

Iranian drones first attacked Amazon data centers on March 1, during the early stages of the ongoing war that began with US and Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28.

AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore “inaccessible resources.” The company also reportedly launched a $150 million customer credit program following Iran’s first attack in March.

Additional Iranian attacks further disrupted AWS operations. In its latest update, AWS acknowledged that its second Bahrain Availability Zone was “disrupted” in April, while saying that most affected customers had already followed its recommendation to move their cloud computing workloads elsewhere.

On July 24, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched additional missile attacks targeting the remaining Amazon data center structures in Bahrain. Satellite images independently confirmed the damage.

“We remain committed to supporting our customers in Bahrain long-term and will share further updates in early 2027,” AWS said.

Regional conflict raises data center risks

Meanwhile, the US-Israel war on Iran has escalated into a broader regional conflict and a growing global energy crisis, including attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb. One potential positive development is increased interest in renewable power generation, including rooftop solar panels, around the world.

This story was originally published by Ars Technica.