Amazon Web Services has said that some customer data and cloud resources in war-damaged data centers cannot be recovered. In a dashboard update posted September 15, the company said customers could not regain access to resources and data in parts of its infrastructure, indicating the severe damage caused by Iranian strikes in the affected regions.
Recovery prospects differ across the two regions
The clearest permanent loss is in mec1-az2, one of the United Arab Emirates region’s three availability zones. The customer information stored there can no longer be retrieved. An availability zone draws on at least one Amazon data center and may draw on several.
Work is also continuing in the other two UAE zones, where AWS is trying to bring hosted services back. The update said teams are replacing damaged infrastructure and would give customers more information about service restoration in the coming months. In other words, two zones remain in the recovery process, while the data in mec1-az2 is gone for good.
Bahrain has a wider access failure
The damage in Bahrain was more widespread. Amazon said customers still could not reach resources or data in any of the region’s three availability zones. AWS explained, “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand.”
That means the destruction went beyond the failure limits built into regional and multi-zone cloud services. The update did not point to one isolated equipment problem; it connected the outage and loss to the physical damage from the strikes.
Three rounds of attacks created the damage
Iranian drones hit Amazon data centers for the first time on March 1, as the war was beginning. The conflict opened with US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28. AWS promptly advised migration to other cloud regions and the use of off-site backups for inaccessible resources.
Iran struck Amazon data centers in Bahrain again on April 1. The update said April brought a disruption to a second availability zone in Bahrain. By then, most affected customers had acted on AWS guidance and moved their cloud computing workloads to other locations.
On July 24, missiles fired by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hit a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain. Satellite imagery independently confirmed the damage. AWS said its long-term support for Bahrain customers will continue, with another update scheduled for early 2027.
Recovery work continues alongside billing relief
Customer billing had already been suspended in the affected AWS regions covering Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. For the past six months, the company has been working to bring operations back to normal. Replacing damaged infrastructure is part of that effort, with more restoration information for the UAE expected in the coming months.
After the first Iranian strikes in March, AWS provided $150 million in credits to customers. The earlier advice to move resources and use off-site backups gave customers a route to restore workloads with copies elsewhere, but it could not recover data that existed only inside the damaged infrastructure.
For Bahrain, the next company update is planned for early 2027. The update did not give a restoration date for the three affected zones there.
Regional conflict is feeding an energy crisis
The conflict that began with US-Israeli attacks on Iran has since widened into a broader regional confrontation. Attacks have hit shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The Bab al-Mandeb Strait has seen similar attacks, and together they are driving a worsening global energy crisis. A rare encouraging side effect has been rapidly growing global interest in renewable electricity, such as rooftop solar panels.
