Amazon Web Services acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates following Iranian drone and missile strikes. The company stated it was unable to restore access to resources and data in multiple affected availability zones, with damage exceeding the design capacity of its multi-AZ services.
The permanent loss of customer data due to geopolitical conflict highlights the risks to critical digital infrastructure and the potential for widespread disruption to businesses reliant on cloud services. The incident underscores the vulnerability of data centers to sophisticated attacks and the limitations of existing disaster recovery measures in extreme scenarios.
Amazon Web Services has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates following a series of Iranian drone and missile strikes on its data centers. The company stated on September 15 that it was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" in some of the war-damaged facilities.
The destruction inflicted by the strikes, which began on March 1, was extensive, with AWS reporting that the damage "spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand." Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region (mec1-az2), and Amazon was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones in the Bahrain region.
Amazon had suspended customer billing in the affected regions and has spent the past six months attempting to restore operations. The initial strikes on March 1 were followed by a second strike on a Bahrain availability zone on April 1, and a further missile strike by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain on July 24, which was confirmed by satellite imagery. The cloud service reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial March strikes.
AWS is working on replacing "affected infrastructure" and expects to update customers on service restoration in the coming months. The ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran has also led to attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb Strait, contributing to a growing global energy crisis.