AWS admits permanent data loss after Middle East datacentre strikes

Data not backed up to other availability zones is gone for good

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AWS has stated that some data and resources held in its datacentres in the Middle East has been permanently lost, due to damage inflicted by drone strikes in the early stages of the Iran war.

In an update to its service health status dashboard dated 15th September, AWS acknowledged that it has been "unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone," one of the three availability zones in the UAE region.

Reuters, citing an AWS update, reports that AWS is also unable to restore access to its cloud computing facility in Bahrain.

After the initial strikes, some customers were able to restore data to other availability zones via backups or copying data to alternative datacentres, but it seems that some data that was not backed up to other regions before the outage may be unrecoverable.

"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 says.

"After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region."

The company says it is continuing to work on "recovering regional resources, as well as zonal resources hosted in the other affected availability zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3)," and that it is working to replace the damaged infrastructure in UAE.

In early March, at the start of the war, two of Amazon’s three AWS Middle East cloud availability zones were disrupted after strikes on or near datacentres in UAE and Bahrain, causing fire, water damage and outages. Amazon has been working on repairing the facilities since then.

At the time, customers were advised to enact disaster recovery plans, migrate workloads to other AWS regions and restore data from remote backups. More than 130 AWS services were disrupted, including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda and RDS.

In July, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for attacks on AWS infrastructure in Bahrain, saying the facilities supported US military operations. This claim has not been independently verified and AWS has not publicly attributed the attacks to Iran.