Amazon admits Iran drones nuked customer data
Damage too widespread to recover much in some regions.
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- AWS says some customer data in Bahrain and the UAE cannot be restored after drone strikes.
- Two UAE availability zones remain significantly impaired after drones directly hit facilities.
- AWS says the damage exceeded backup systems designed to handle single-facility failures.
- AWS advised many customers to move workloads to other regions before Bahrain became unavailable.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Amazon has admitted some customer data is gone for good after drone strikes during the Iran war hit its Middle East data centers.
Six months after the attacks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it has exhausted attempts to recover data stored in parts of its cloud infrastructure in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) because the damage was too widespread.
Some customers are effectively being told to rebuild elsewhere, with AWS offering to support a move to alternative regions.
Bahrain hit hard
In early March, Iranian drone strikes hit AWS data centers in the Middle East. In the UAE region (me-central-1), 2 facilities were directly struck by drones.
Amazon reports that 2 “availability zones” – mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 – remain significantly impaired, while a third, mec1-az1, survived but some services dependent on the damaged zones were still affected.
Separately, Reuters reported that in Bahrain (a region referred to as me-south-1), a drone struck close to one facility, causing structural damage and power disruption.
In the weeks that followed, in April, a second availability zone was disrupted in the island nation region, taking its AWS services completely offline.
Amazon's safety net destroyed
AWS normally relies on redundancy across multiple facilities so service continues if one fails.
But according to its status updates, damage to multiple sites overwhelmed the backup systems designed to handle single facility failures.
In a September 15th status update, AWS admitted some of the data was lost forever.
"We are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in mec1-az2 Availability Zone.
“We continue to work on recovering regional resources, as well as zonal resources hosted in the other affected Availability Zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3)."
For its Bahrain, update published the same bulletin however, AWS said the extent of the damage was such that it would not be able to restore data.
The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,- AWS Bahrain status update
“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region.
"When the first Availability Zone was damaged in March, we began recommending that customers migrate their workloads to other regions, and most did so before the Region became unavailable following the disruption of a second Availability Zone in April," it added.
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The identities of customers who permanently lost data in the affected regions have not been disclosed, but Reuters reported that some banks experienced outages following the March strikes.
In a Farsi News Agency Telegram message posted in March, Tehran claimed that it sent drones to Bahrain to identify data centers allegedly supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities.
The news agency, which has close ties to the Iran regime, described the strikes as an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps operation targeting Amazon and Microsoft infrastructure in the region.
