AWS says some customer data is permanently unrecoverable after strikes

Some data remains unrecoverable in damaged centers

Ars Technica reports that AWS said it could not restore access to some resources and data hosted in data centers damaged in Iranian strikes. The report says data was irretrievably lost in one availability zone in the United Arab Emirates, while AWS could not restore access across all three availability zones in Bahrain. AWS was reportedly still replacing affected infrastructure and working to recover regional resources.

Following the strikes, AWS had spent six months trying to restore normal operations and urged customers to migrate resources or use remote backups.

AWS has now acknowledged that some hosted customer data cannot be recovered, while restoration work continues for other affected resources.

Restoring service and acknowledging data loss

The reported update describes a limit to regional and multi-availability-zone resilience under damage spanning multiple zones, alongside an acknowledged loss of customer data rather than only a service outage.