Amazon Web Services has confirmed that some customer data stored in its Middle East data centers is permanently lost. After six months of recovery work, AWS said it is unable to restore certain resources damaged during the war with Iran, according to CNBC. The losses trace back to Iranian strikes on AWS facilities in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
AWS organizes its hardware into Regions, such as the me-south-1 region in Bahrain or the me-central-1 region in the UAE. Within these regions, there are multiple Availability Zones. Each zone is a physically separate cluster of one or more data centers, designed to keep services running even if one site loses power or suffers a fire.
The trouble started shortly after the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran broke out in late February. Iranian drone strikes hit AWS infrastructure in the UAE, directly damaging two facilities. At the same time, a strike near a Bahrain facility damaged its infrastructure. The attacks caused structural damage, power loss, and water damage from fire-suppression systems.
Bahrain kept getting hit even after the whole region went offline
The situation in Bahrain deteriorated further when a second Availability Zone was damaged in April, effectively knocking the entire region offline. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps then claimed another attack on AWS infrastructure in Bahrain in July, this time with cruise missiles. Satellite imagery later appeared to confirm fresh damage at two sites.
AWS hasn’t publicly said how much data was lost or how many customers were affected. However, it has identified the specific infrastructure that is unrecoverable. In Bahrain, AWS says it cannot restore access to resources and data stored exclusively in the me-south-1 region.
In the UAE, the issue is isolated to data stored exclusively in the mec1-az2 zone. AWS is still working to recover resources in the other two UAE zones and says it is replacing the affected infrastructure. The company expects to share an update on that work in the coming months.
The permanent loss hits only customers whose sole copy of their data sat inside the damaged infrastructure. Customers who replicated their data or kept backups in a different AWS region could rebuild their environments elsewhere. AWS said most Bahrain customers had already moved their workloads to other regions before the second zone went down, as the company began urging migrations after the first strike.
AWS designs its architecture so that a local disaster, like a flood or a power failure, shouldn’t take down an entire region. However, the Bahrain region went down anyway, as the damage spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what AWS says its services are designed to withstand.
The fallout from the March attacks was immediate, as the outages hit banks and payment services across the region. The Dubai-based super app Careem was affected, though it restored operations by moving workloads elsewhere. Cloud-data firm Snowflake also dealt with the disruption.
Amazon took a financial hit as well, as the company suspended billing in the affected regions after the strikes. Amazon waived an estimated $150 million in March usage charges alone, before counting the cost of replacing the damaged data centers.
The UAE is reportedly revising plans for a major AI data center project after the strikes. Officials are considering spreading facilities across the country, building some underground, and adding air defenses and blast-resistant concrete. In the meantime, Iran keeps targeting Gulf states hosting US forces, with its recent barrage on Kuwait among the latest attacks.
AWS says it remains committed to its Bahrain customers in the long term and expects to share a further update on the region in early 2027.
Published: Sep 17, 2026 04:15 pm