Amazon Confirms Permanent Customer Data Loss After Iranian Strikes on Middle East Data Centers
AWS says data in Bahrain’s three availability zones is permanently unrecoverable, while UAE loss is limited to mec1-az2. The Sept. 15 disclosure followed six months of strikes; AWS reportedly issued $150 million in credits and suspended billing.
Amazon Web Services has acknowledged the permanent loss of customer data stored in its Middle East data centers, six months after Iranian drone and missile strikes destroyed infrastructure across its Bahrain and United Arab Emirates regions.
In a dashboard update posted on September 15, 2026, AWS stated it was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged facilities. In the UAE, data was irretrievably lost in one of three availability zones — specifically the mec1-az2 zone. The situation in Bahrain was more severe: Amazon confirmed it could not restore data across all three availability zones in that region. “The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the company said.
The strikes began on March 1, 2026, the day after US-Israeli attacks on Iran, when Iranian drones first hit the Amazon data centers. A follow-up strike targeted Bahrain on April 1, and on July 24, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched a missile strike against a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain, damage later confirmed by satellite imagery.
AWS had urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions following the initial March strikes and reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits. The company also suspended billing in the affected regions and says it continues working to recover resources in the two remaining UAE availability zones. A further update on Bahrain operations is promised for early 2027.
The data loss highlights a significant vulnerability in cloud infrastructure: AWS’s own acknowledgment suggests its data centers were not designed to withstand the scale of damage inflicted by sustained military strikes. For businesses that relied on the affected regions without off-site backups or cross-region redundancy, the data may be unrecoverable.