Data that lived only on Amazon Web Services’ wrecked Bahrain facilities is now permanently lost, the company has told customers, ending recovery efforts more than six months after drone strikes ripped through the sites in the opening days of the Iran war.
Posted to the AWS health dashboard on Tuesday, the notice is the company’s first public word on the incidents since April. The damage across multiple Bahrain sites spanned several availability zones and, as AWS put it, exceeded what its regional and multi-availability-zone services are built to survive.
“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this region,” the company wrote.
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Things are marginally better in the United Arab Emirates. One UAE availability zone, labeled mec1-az2, was damaged beyond hope of recovery, and AWS said it cannot retrieve resources and data held exclusively there. Two other affected zones remain the focus of ongoing salvage work by engineers.
The redundancy built into AWS proved insufficient here. Availability zones are clusters of one or more data centers located within the same geographic region, a design meant to keep services online when any single site goes down.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed the attacks, saying the Bahrain facility was hit because of Amazon’s support for the U.S. military. The trouble began in March, when direct hits struck two of Amazon’s UAE data centers and a nearby drone strike destroyed the infrastructure at its Bahrain site. By April, a second wave of damage had wiped out the company’s entire data center network in the country.
By the time the sites went offline, most customers were already elsewhere. Following AWS advice, the bulk of Bahrain-based users had moved their workloads to other regions ahead of the shutdown. UAE customers largely got back up and running in other regions, leaning on backups or copying whatever data was still reachable.
Support for customers in both countries will continue, Amazon said. Updates on the UAE situation are expected in the coming months, with more for Bahrain users due in early 2027. The company’s footprint also includes data center clusters in India, Israel and several European countries.
