Military drone and missile strikes have permanently destroyed customer data hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, prompting Amazon Web Services to admit it cannot recover the files. An AWS Health dashboard update published on September 15 said access to certain resources and data could not be restored. Reuters reported the admission first.

Irrecoverable customer data was identified in mec1-az2, one of the three availability zones in the UAE region. These zones are isolated locations within a region, designed to protect against local failures. Each availability zone is served by one or more Amazon data centers. AWS is replacing damaged infrastructure and working to restore regional resources in the other two UAE zones. The provider expects to give customers another service update in the coming months.

The situation in Bahrain is broader. AWS says resources and data remain inaccessible across all three availability zones there. The damage crossed multiple zones and exceeded the resilience limits of the regional and multi-AZ services. AWS had not designed the facilities to withstand wartime destruction.

The first Iranian drone strikes hit on March 1, shortly after US-Israeli attacks on Iran began the war on February 28. AWS urged customers to move workloads to other cloud regions and use remote backups for inaccessible resources. Reports said the provider issued $150 million in customer credits after the initial attacks. Billing in Bahrain and the UAE was suspended, and AWS spent the following six months trying to restore normal operations.

A further Iranian attack hit Bahrain on April 1. AWS later acknowledged disruption to a second availability zone there and said most affected customers had already moved their workloads. On July 24, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps used missiles against a remaining Amazon data center structure in Bahrain. Satellite imagery independently confirmed the damage.

AWS says it will continue supporting customers in Bahrain and plans another update in early 2027. The wider conflict has expanded across the region, with attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait contributing to a global energy crisis. Worldwide interest in renewable power, including rooftop solar, has also increased.