Amazon Confirms Permanent Data Loss From Iranian Strikes on Data Centers
Six months after Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the UAE, AWS has confirmed some customer data is permanently unrecoverable. The company is still working to restore services in both regions.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that some customer data stored in its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates data centers is permanently lost following Iranian military strikes earlier this year. The admission came in a dashboard update posted on September 15, capping six months of recovery efforts.
In the UAE region, data was irretrievably lost in one of three availability zones, identified as mec1-az2. Each availability zone is served by one or more physical Amazon data centers. AWS said it continues working to restore resources in the other two UAE zones and replace damaged infrastructure, promising further updates in the coming months.
The damage proved even more severe in Bahrain, where AWS was unable to restore access to data or resources across all three availability zones. The company said the destruction exceeded what its regional and multi-zone backup systems were built to withstand.
Timeline of attacks
Iranian drones first struck Amazon's data centers on March 1, in the early days of a war triggered by US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28. AWS quickly urged affected customers to migrate workloads to other cloud regions and rely on backups, and reportedly issued roughly $150 million in customer credits. A second strike hit Bahrain's data centers on April 1, and on July 24 Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a missile strike specifically targeting the remaining Amazon facility in Bahrain — damage later confirmed by satellite imagery.
AWS had already suspended customer billing in the affected regions. The company said it remains committed to supporting Bahrain customers long-term and plans to provide another update in early 2027.
The broader US-Israeli-Iran conflict has since escalated into a wider regional war, disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and contributing to a growing global energy crisis.
