Amazon Web Services Confirms Permanent Data Loss Following Attacks on Middle East Infrastructure

Amazon Web Services has acknowledged the permanent loss of customer data hosted within its Middle Eastern infrastructure following physical strikes on data centers located in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The confirmation comes six months after military drone attacks first disabled multiple facilities in the region.

According to a dashboard status update issued by AWS on September 15, as first reported by Wired, the cloud computing division was unable to recover access to stored resources and data in the affected facilities. The extent of the structural damage prevented standard data recovery protocols from restoring the compromised systems.

The data loss in the United Arab Emirates was localized to one of the region's three availability zones, designated as mec1-az2. AWS stated that technical teams are currently replacing damaged infrastructure and working to restore operational capacity across the remaining two availability zones in the UAE, with service updates expected in the coming months.

Destruction of the company's Bahrain infrastructure was considerably more severe. AWS confirmed that access to data and system resources across all three availability zones in the Bahrain region could not be restored, stating that the structural damage exceeded what its regional multi-availability-zone architectures were engineered to withstand.

The disruptions began on March 1 when Iranian military drones hit Amazon facilities shortly after the onset of hostilities initiated by U.S. and Israeli actions on February 28. In response to the initial strikes, AWS suspended customer billing across the impacted regions, distributed approximately $150 million in service credits, and advised clients to transition workloads to alternative global regions while utilizing remote backups.

Infrastructure in Bahrain faced subsequent attacks in the following months. A second strike damaged facilities on April 1, followed by a July 24 missile attack by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targeting a remaining Amazon facility in Bahrain, an strike confirmed through satellite imagery analysis. AWS noted that the majority of affected clients had already migrated their operations prior to the later attacks, adding that its next formal update regarding Bahrain operations will be released in early 2027.

The physical destruction of commercial data center assets comes amid a widening regional conflict that has disrupted international commercial shipping routes in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, amplifying global energy concerns while accelerating interest in localized renewable energy installations.