AWS Confirms Data Loss After Iran Strikes Hit Middle East Sites

Key Takeaways

• AWS cannot restore resources and data hosted exclusively in a damaged Bahrain Availability Zone.
• Customers with backups or accessible copies largely resumed operations in other AWS regions.
• The incident puts renewed attention on cross-region recovery as Amazon pursues a multi-year $220 billion infrastructure spending program.

Amazon Web Services has confirmed that some customer resources and data stored in its Middle East infrastructure cannot be recovered, roughly six months after Iranian drone strikes damaged data centers in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone,” AWS said in a Health Dashboard update Tuesday.

The Bahrain region has effectively remained offline after damage across multiple Availability Zones. In the UAE, data held in one of AWS’s three Availability Zones also cannot be recovered. AWS plans to continue pursuing restoration of regional resources and assets hosted in other affected zones, according to the original report from CRN.

Cloud Availability Zones are designed to reduce the risk that a failure at one facility disrupts an entire region, but they do not automatically protect data stored exclusively in one zone or substitute for independent backups and cross-region replication. Physical destruction turns this architectural limitation into a costly operational reality.

Most affected customers were able to resume operations elsewhere. “Since the disruption began in March, most customers have been able to re-establish their operations in other regions by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible,” AWS said.

The disruption highlights the importance of testing recovery procedures to ensure they function if an entire regional control environment and parts of the underlying infrastructure become inaccessible.

The strikes occurred in early March during the opening phase of the Iran war. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility, saying Amazon was targeted because of its support for the United States military. Contemporary reporting from Reuters documented damage to Amazon’s cloud facilities in the UAE and Bahrain.

AWS said at the time that the attacks caused structural damage and interrupted power delivery. Fire suppression efforts also produced additional water damage in some locations. Those combined effects complicate recovery because computing equipment, storage systems, power infrastructure, and network connections may all require separate assessment or replacement.

The permanence of some data loss, also reported by Bloomberg, illustrates how geopolitical conflict can reach enterprise systems even when customers have outsourced physical infrastructure to a hyperscaler.

While redundancy inside one cloud region mitigates equipment failures and localized disruptions, a military attack creates a broader failure domain. Organizations are advised to ensure backup copies are logically isolated, geographically separated, and recoverable without access to the affected region’s management services.

Gartner’s 2024 resilience guidance has also highlighted the risk posed by control-plane failures. Data-plane traffic may continue in some circumstances, yet administrators can still lose the ability to modify resources or execute remediation. Tested contingency procedures therefore matter alongside redundant infrastructure.

Common enterprise approaches include recovery planning informed by NIST SP 800-34 Rev.1 and availability controls under ISO/IEC 27001:2022. For AWS customers, practical reviews may include recovery time and recovery point objectives, cross-region copies, backup immutability, identity dependencies, and regular restoration exercises. Similar considerations apply to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Global cloud infrastructure services spending reached $110.9 billion in Q4 2025, according to Omdia, rising 29% year over year. AWS held a 32% market share and recorded 24% revenue growth. With this scale, prolonged regional disruption impacts a massive base of enterprise operations.

Amazon has committed to a multi-year $220 billion infrastructure program to support capacity demands and rebuild facilities. The company recently announced a $6 billion data center campus in Louisiana, following a $12 billion investment announced earlier, bringing AWS’s Louisiana investment to approximately $18 billion.

A cloud solutions partner CEO noted that compute and AI inference capacity remain scarce. “You’re seeing Amazon sink so much capital expense into data centers today to see the ROI in two, three, maybe four years from now because they know that it’s absolutely needed,” the CEO said.

AWS generated $42.2 billion in second-quarter 2026 revenue, producing a record $169 billion annual run rate. AWS said it remains committed to Bahrain and the UAE and is replacing affected infrastructure, with further service-restoration updates expected in the coming months.