AWS says some Bahrain and UAE cloud resources cannot be restored

Bahrain resources and one UAE zone deemed unrecoverable

According to The Register’s account of AWS updates, damage during the US war with Iran affected multiple Availability Zones. AWS said the damage in Bahrain exceeded the resilience designed into its regional and multi-Availability-Zone services, leaving resources and data hosted exclusively in the Bahrain Region inaccessible and not restorable. It reportedly reached the same conclusion for mec1-az2, one of three Availability Zones in its UAE Region. AWS said it was still working to recover resources in other affected UAE Availability Zones and that most customers had restarted elsewhere from backups or accessible data.

After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to move workloads to other Regions while it sought to recover affected resources.

AWS has reportedly concluded that it cannot restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region or in one Availability Zone in the UAE.

Availability Zones are isolated groups of one or more datacenters within an AWS Region. The reported finding illustrates that distributing a workload across Zones can limit a single-site failure, but does not preserve access when damage affects a whole Region; recovery in another Region depends on backups or replicated data.