Amazon · Iran · United Arab Emirates · Wired
Customer Data Permanently Shed in Iran Strikes on Amazon Data Centers
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Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Key facts
- The Iranian drones first struck the Amazon data centers on March 1 in the opening days of the ongoing war that began with US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28
- On July 24, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched yet another strike using missiles that specifically targeted a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain
- AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources
- Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15
Summary
Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates. But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there.