Half a year after Iranian drone attacks destroyed several Amazon data centers, the American technology company acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Amazon Web Services “was unable to restore access to resources and data” housed in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update published on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian attacks inflicted catastrophic damage to data centers.
Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of the three AWS availability zones in the UAE region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is served by one or more Amazon data centers.
The company is still working on “recovering regional resources” and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates. The AWS update outlined ongoing work to replace the “impacted infrastructure” and promised to update customers on restoration of services in the coming months.
But the destruction was apparently even more widespread in data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it could not restore access to resources and data in the three availability zones there.
“The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to support,” the AWS update said.
