AWS Confirms Permanent Data Loss After Drone Attacks on Middle East Data Centers
Six months after the attacks, AWS is telling customers that isolation to a single availability zone turned an outage into unrecoverable loss, which puts the redundancy assumption at the center of how the region gets rebuilt.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
Amazon Web Services says data hosted only in the availability zone called mec1-az2 was permanently lost after drone attacks damaged three facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in March 2026. AWS also says it is working on recovery for mec1-az1 and mec1-az3, with no prospect of restoration at the time of the announcement. Billing for the Middle East region has stopped.
Data distributed across other availability zones escaped damage, but resources hosted only in mec1-az2 cannot be recovered. Recovery work at mec1-az1 and mec1-az3 continues, and AWS says there was no prospect of restoration when it made the announcement. The company has stopped billing customers in the Middle East region and is urging them to migrate data elsewhere. Iran's Revolutionary Guard judged that the affected data center supported military and intelligence activities, according to the report.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.