Amazon Web Services has acknowledged that customer data stored in its Middle East facilities in Bahrain and the UAE is permanently lost. The admission came in updates posted six months after Iranian drone strikes damaged the company's regional infrastructure. AWS says it can no longer recover the affected data, and one Availability Zone in the UAE remains inaccessible.
The strikes overwhelmed the redundancy that normally protects cloud workloads, according to The Register. WIRED notes that AWS did not design these data centers to withstand war, a factor that contributed to the scale of the loss. Tom's Hardware reports that AWS has told customers to move their data to other regions and has offered no timeline for completing repairs.
In response to the incident, the UAE is reportedly considering underground data centers as a way to better protect critical infrastructure. The sources agree on the core facts of the permanent data loss and the lack of a recovery path, though they differ slightly on emphasis: WIRED focuses on design limitations, while The Register highlights the failure of regional redundancy.