Iranian strikes on AWS facilities left customer data beyond recovery in Bahrain, UAE

Six months after Iranian drone strikes tore through its Middle East infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has acknowledged the permanent loss of customer data in Bahrain and the UAE.

In two updates posted September 15, AWS said it can no longer recover customer data and resources stored in its Middle East (Bahrain) region, known as me-south-1, or in one availability zone of its Middle East (UAE) region, known as me-central-1.

For the UAE, the loss is contained to one part of the region. AWS reported it is “unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in mec1-az2,” one of three availability zones, while work continues on the other two, mec1-az1 and mec1-az3, along with shared regional infrastructure.

“We remain committed to supporting our customers in the UAE. We are working on replacing the affected infrastructure and will provide an update on the restoration of our services in the coming months. We have notified the relevant authorities and continue to work with them toward that goal,” reads the AWS dashboard update.

Bahrain’s losses go further than the UAE’s. AWS wrote that it is “unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region,” adding that the damage spread over multiple availability zones and exceeded what its redundancy design could withstand.

“We remain committed to supporting our customers in Bahrain in the long term and will share a further update in early 2027.”

The company said most customers in both regions had already relocated before the losses became permanent, “using backups where available or implementing alternative solutions to mitigate the impact of inaccessible data.”

Iran’s strikes began in early March, in retaliation for a joint US-Israeli military campaign against the country. Gulf states hosting American military bases, including the UAE and Bahrain, became targets.

“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” the company wrote at the time. “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”

Bahrain’s situation worsened in the weeks that followed. A second availability zone was disrupted in April, taking the region completely offline.

Given how the situation on the ground keeps escalating, AWS data centers in the Middle East are unlikely to be spared further attacks.