// ARS TECHNICA — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data
War damage to data centers exceeded what AWS services are designed to withstand.
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.
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. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.
Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.
The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates. The AWS update described ongoing work to replace “affected infrastructure” and promised to update customers on a restoration of services in the coming months.
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.
“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand,” the AWS update said.
The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations.
The Iranian drones first struck the Amazon data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates on March 1 in the opening days of the ongoing war that began with US-Israeli attacks on Iran on February 28.
AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.