AWS Says Some Gulf Data Is Lost Beyond Recovery

What AWS told customers

Amazon Web Services said it is unable to restore access to some customer data hosted in Persian Gulf data centers that were struck by Iranian drones in the spring, the Wall Street Journal reported. The announcement is the first indication that data stored exclusively in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates could be gone for good.

In a status update, AWS wrote that after a thorough assessment it had determined it was unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain region. Minutes later it posted an equivalent finding for one availability zone of its UAE region. Work continues on two other UAE zones.

Six months of outages

The data centers have been mostly offline since Iran launched drone swarms at them in the opening days of the U.S. war against the Islamic Republic, the Journal reported, with the damage in Bahrain spread across multiple AWS facilities. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility, saying it targeted the Bahrain site over Amazon's support for the U.S. military.

AWS said the damage to its infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what its regional and multi-zone services are designed to withstand. Through the spring it urged customers to recover from backups kept in other regions and to move workloads away from the affected sites.

What it means for cloud planning

AWS has not published how many customers or how much data were affected. It said most customers re-established their operations in other regions, either by restoring backups or copying data that remained accessible, and that it remains committed to supporting customers in Bahrain and the UAE.

Further updates on the UAE are expected in the coming months, with more for Bahrain in early 2027. The episode has sharpened a broader question for anyone running workloads in one country: redundancy inside a single region protects against local failures, but it is not the same thing as a backup stored somewhere else.