AWS confirms permanent data loss in Bahrain, UAE after Iran war
Customer data hosted exclusively in Bahrain and one UAE cloud zone cannot be recovered after wartime infrastructure damage
CAIRO, Egypt (MNTV) — Amazon Web Services has confirmed that some customer data stored in its cloud infrastructure in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates can no longer be recovered after facilities were damaged during the Iran war.
Gadget Review reported that AWS acknowledged the permanent loss in updates to its Health Dashboard, stating that it could not restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in Bahrain and one availability zone in the UAE.
The announcement came six months after drone strikes severely damaged AWS facilities in both countries.
In Bahrain, the damage affected multiple availability zones and exceeded the level of disruption AWS’s regional and multi-zone systems were designed to withstand.
The company said it had completed an assessment and exhausted available options for recovering data and resources that had not been moved elsewhere.
The situation in the UAE is more limited but still includes permanent losses. AWS said resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone cannot be restored, while work continues on infrastructure and resources in the other two availability zones.
The facilities were damaged during attacks in March, when Iranian drones struck AWS infrastructure in Bahrain and the UAE. AWS said the attacks caused structural damage and power disruptions, while firefighting operations resulted in additional water damage at some facilities.
AWS had previously advised customers in the affected regions to move their workloads to other cloud regions and use remote backups to recover inaccessible resources.
The company said most customers followed those recommendations before further damage disrupted additional infrastructure in Bahrain.
Customers that maintained copies outside the affected regions were therefore able to restore operations using backups or alternative arrangements.
Those whose information existed only within the damaged infrastructure faced the loss of data that AWS has now determined cannot be recovered.
The incident has highlighted the limits of cloud redundancy when multiple physically separated facilities within the same geographic region are damaged simultaneously.
AWS’s multi-availability-zone design is intended to protect against individual infrastructure failures, but the scale of the wartime destruction exceeded those assumptions.
The prolonged disruption has also raised wider questions about the resilience of rapidly expanding cloud and artificial-intelligence infrastructure in the Gulf.
Regional governments and technology companies are now facing greater pressure to consider physical security and geographic diversification alongside conventional digital redundancy.
AWS said it remains committed to customers in both Bahrain and the UAE. The company is replacing affected infrastructure in the UAE and expects to provide further information about service restoration, while a further update on Bahrain operations is expected in early 2027.
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