Amazon Web Services has told customers that certain data stored in its Middle East facilities damaged by Iranian strikes earlier this year cannot be recovered, marking the company's clearest admission yet that some of the losses from the attacks are permanent.
According to a WSJ report, AWS disclosed that it cannot restore access to some customer data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain and UAE data centers. The report notes this is the first indication that data stored solely in those two locations could be permanently lost.
AWS facilities largely remained offline in affected areas
The affected facilities have largely remained offline since Iran launched drone attacks against them in early March, at the start of the broader US-Israeli military conflict with Tehran. In Bahrain, the damage was not confined to a single site but spread across several AWS facilities.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility for the strikes at the time, saying the Bahrain facility was targeted because of Amazon's ties to US military operations. AWS's UAE region lost two of its three availability zones, while its Bahrain region lost one, an unusually severe blow given that AWS's infrastructure is normally built to withstand the failure of a single zone rather than coordinated strikes across multiple sites.
Customers shifted workloads to other AWS regions
Amazon had previously told customers to shift their workloads to other AWS regions and warned that operations in the Middle East were likely to remain unpredictable. Tuesday's update was the company's first public word on the incident since April, and it comes more than six months after the original strikes - underscoring how extensive the physical damage to the sites turned out to be.
The episode has drawn attention to the vulnerability of cloud infrastructure in conflict zones and raised broader questions about the resilience of data-center buildouts in the Gulf, a region that has been positioning itself as a hub for global cloud and AI infrastructure investment.
