Customer Data Permanently Lost in Iran Strikes on Amazon Data Centers

Amazon Web Services didn't design its data centers to withstand war, and now the company admits it can't recover what's been lost.

Permanent Data Loss Confirmed

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. According to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15, Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.

Impact by Region

United Arab Emirates: Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the UAE region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers. The company is still working on "recovering regional resources" and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the UAE. The AWS update described ongoing work to replace "affected infrastructure" and promised to update customers on a restoration of services in the coming months.

Bahrain: The destruction was apparently even more widespread in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the AWS update said.

AWS Response

The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the UAE and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations. AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.

Timeline of Strikes

1. February 28 - The ongoing war began with US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
2. March 1 - Iranian drones first struck the Amazon data centers in the opening days of the war.
3. April 1 - A follow-up Iranian strike focused on Amazon's data centers in Bahrain. The latest AWS update acknowledged this "disruption" of a second availability zone in the Bahrain region in April but described most affected customers as having already followed the company's recommendations to migrate their cloud computing workloads elsewhere.
4. July 24 - Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched yet another strike using missiles that specifically targeted a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain. That damage was independently confirmed by satellite imagery.

Looking Ahead

"We remain committed to supporting our customers in Bahrain in the long term and will share a further update in early 2027," the latest AWS update said.

Broader Conflict Context

Meanwhile, the US-Israeli war with Iran has since spiraled into a broader regional conflict and growing global energy crisis because of attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. One of the few silver linings has been the surging interest worldwide in renewable power generation, such as solar rooftop panels.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.