AWS Fails to Restore Data at Damaged Gulf Facilities

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it cannot restore access to some data stored at facilities in the Persian Gulf that were damaged during the US-Iran conflict. The company posted an update on its status health page, stating that it is unable to access data hosted exclusively in data centers in Bahrain and parts of its network in the United Arab Emirates.

The damage occurred early in the conflict, with satellite imagery showing hits to two Amazon data centers in Bahrain. According to AWS, the damage exceeded what their services were designed to withstand. Most customers had already moved their workloads to server farms in other countries by the time of the strikes in March and subsequent damage in April that knocked out Amazon's data center network in the country.

While most customers in the UAE restored operations by relying on backups or copying data that remained accessible, AWS cannot access data stored in one of its availability zones. Engineers are continuing to work on recovering resources in two other availability zones.

Amazon remains committed to supporting customers in the two countries and has promised a further update on Bahrain early next year. The company also operates data center clusters in India, Israel, and several European countries.