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Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data (arstechnica.com) 212

Ars Technica reports: Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers. Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone.

Each availability zone is serviced 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... But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all 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 withstand," the AWS update said.

The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations... [When the war began] AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.

Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17, 2026 @04:43PM (#66341476)

    How is the world better off now than it was before this war started?

    • by Tomahawk ( 1343 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @04:49PM (#66341478) Homepage
      Well, Trump says it is, so it must be. He _never_ lies or makes stuff up... /s
      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 17, 2026 @07:24PM (#66341690)
        Obviously Amazon should have given Trump a lot more than the lousy $1 million they gave him. Be cheap, get bombed.
        • by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @08:55PM (#66341768) Homepage

          More on topic, I think cloud customers should be aware that if their datacenter is destroyed, they *will* lose data if they didn't take care of replicating their data to a different geolocation.

          Exactly the same happened when an OVH datacenter caught on fire in France. Many customers which didn't have replication set to a different geolocation lost their data. Heck a dude I know had backups on different servers in the same datacenter which turned out to be useless.

          I replicate my filesystem to different geolocation at least every 10 minutes and I have pseudo real time replication (usually below 1 seconds) database replication with log replay.

          • by ls671 ( 1122017 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @09:19PM (#66341792) Homepage

            While at it, take snapshots on the remote server to prevent against ransomware attacks and your prod server shouldn't have any access to the replication server in a different geolocation otherwise hackers will delete/encrypt data on the replication server too. The replication server should pull the data from the prod server with something like this:

            CMD_OUTPUT=`ssh -C -l root -p 52812 $HOST zfs send rpool/data/${ZVOL}@${NEW_SNAP_NAME} | zfs recv rpool/datarep/${ZVOL} 2>&1`

            I know it's possible to give the prod server access to the replication server like in the proxmox backup server architecture and set permissions on the replication server so snapshots can't be deleted but I find it much more safer to protect the replication server in its own VLAN and protect it almost like a CA and insure nobody and nothing has access to the replication server.

            • This is why I still like the (very) old fashion tape backupp systems. Just backup to tape every day (And preferably a copy kept in a bank safe or whatever. In case your office literally burns down or whatever) and if you get ransomware, just send "Fuck you" to the attacker, go to the safe, restore, be done with it.

              Granted the cloud... not so easy. But I always prefer old school on-premise servers so whatever.

              • This is why I still like the (very) old fashion tape backupp systems. Just backup to tape every day (And preferably a copy kept in a bank safe or whatever. In case your office literally burns down or whatever) and if you get ransomware, just send "Fuck you" to the attacker, go to the safe, restore, be done with it.

                Granted the cloud... not so easy. But I always prefer old school on-premise servers so whatever.

                I ended up with a bad taste about tape backup after several failed restores from the institute's IT department I need up setting up my own servers with redundant backup. Maybe they had a bad implementation on their part. I dunno, but I didn't trust it.

          • It's important to remember that not only is "the cloud" just "someone else's computer", but that that computer is a '286 PC with a 20MB MFM hard drive.
          • More on topic, I think cloud customers should be aware that if their datacenter is destroyed, they *will* lose data if they didn't take care of replicating their data to a different geolocation.

            This! Early on in the cloud era, I tried to point out that the claims of perfect security was utter bullshit. That you might have some pretend unbreakable encryption, but if your data is lost through bad actors or calamitous loss, you still don't have it, and that means no real security.

            In discussions with a provider, I asked about this hardware security. Eventually he said I should have a local backup of everything as well. Which kinda defeats the entire concept of storing possibly critical data on som

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@@@worf...net> on Friday September 18, 2026 @10:57AM (#66342452)

            More on topic, I think cloud customers should be aware that if their datacenter is destroyed, they *will* lose data if they didn't take care of replicating their data to a different geolocation.

            Exactly the same happened when an OVH datacenter caught on fire in France. Many customers which didn't have replication set to a different geolocation lost their data. Heck a dude I know had backups on different servers in the same datacenter which turned out to be useless.

            There's a difference though.

            People using OVH were using OVH as a hosting service - like the hosting providers of old. You either rent space in a data centre like a colo, or you purchase a virtual or physical server from the data centre. Blow up the data centre and your server goes along with it.

            AWS is not a hosting service. They are a cloud provider. You cannot choose what data centre your server is located in. You request a server and it's provisioned for you. You choose a region of the world and the data backup and replication are handled automatically. If a data centre is blown up, the servers are backed up elsewhere in the region.

            The problem for AWS is that Iran managed to blow up a number of AWS data centres at the same time where all copies and backups of servers can be destroyed.

            AWS compensates for losing a data centre by having multiple in a region. AWS just never anticipated that multiple data centres in a region could be attacked, and in doing so destroy all the redundant copies simultaneously. Because in general if you are going to have multiple data centres in multiple countries get attacked, there's traditionally been a lot of advance warning, like say, a war declaration. I mean, if war broke out in the Middle East then you'd have a little bit of time to try to move as much data around as you can. But Iran just managed to attack all the data centres by surprise. And do so in such a precise way that basically no one outside the building got hurt.

            It's a level of precision that Iran is demonstrating - even attacking US positions without destroying the military base it was attached to. (It's why the USS Lincoln ran into programs - because Iran destroyed the supply depot in the Middle East, resulting in having to obtain supplies from Asia. The result was resupply which used to take under a day now took a week)

        • Bezos can handle this directly. He makes very large methane/oxygen bombs.
        • Obviously Amazon should have given Trump a lot more than the lousy $1 million they gave him. Be cheap, get bombed.

          Well Qatar gave Trump $400 million and they still got bombed. So what is the right price to be free from Trump's tyranny?

    • by fabioalcor ( 1663783 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @04:59PM (#66341484)

      How is the world better off now than it was before this war started?

      You ask that as if our beloved leaders' intention were to create a better world.

    • by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:02PM (#66341488) Journal
      You'll notice we "liberated" Venezuela's oil reserves for absolutely no goddamned reason, shortly before we started a war with Iran for absolutely no goddamned reason.

      Those two seemingly random instances of the US Executive merely being woefully incompetent make the real reason pretty clear. And in case we needed any more evidence, crude is still over $100/bbl.
      • by larryjoe ( 135075 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:30PM (#66341542)

        You'll notice we "liberated" Venezuela's oil reserves for absolutely no goddamned reason, shortly before we started a war with Iran for absolutely no goddamned reason.

        Unfortunately, the reason for Trump doing what he did was simply that he could. He had the power to do something that no one else in the world could do, so he did it to show that he could do something that no one else could do. The great irony is that Trump is consumed with his appearance and yet his actions make him look bad. The only reason he doesn't recognize the obviousness of the badness is that he has surrounded himself with yes-men and carpetbaggers that inflate his already enormous lack of awareness.

      • by SpzToid ( 869795 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:44PM (#66341570)

        You'll notice we "liberated" Venezuela's oil reserves for absolutely no goddamned reason, shortly before we started a war with Iran for absolutely no goddamned reason.

        No, that's not true. The reason Trump went to war with Iran was to distract everyone from the Epstein files, which were gaining serious news cycle coverage at the time. ...and the Epstein files are like an iceberg. We still don't know how big they are yet, but we keep discovering more serious stuff.

      • by znrt ( 2424692 )

        well, it's not going to work, so in the end it's still incompetence ...

      • by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @06:21PM (#66341624)
        Good analysis. I'll add the price of crude continues to increase because the cost of shipping continues to rise quite rapidly. Insurance fees have gone through the roof, fuel costs are up, some ships are being rerouted all the around Africa with commensurate costs. The Saudis' east-west pipeline is out of commission for an indeterminate period. And now that the Houthi control the southern entrance to the Red Sea, all it will take is a couple of potshots at passing ships to exacerbate all of this further. All because Trump couldn't stand the idea that a black President had negotiated a working (imperfectly, but working) deal with Iran that kept everything manageable and because he's surrounded himself with sycophants who are just as ignorant of asymmetric warfare as he is.
      • You'll notice we "liberated" Venezuela's oil reserves for absolutely no goddamned reason, shortly before we started a war with Iran for absolutely no goddamned reason.

        Both of those countries had sweetheart deals to sell oil to China.

    • A number of countries have accelerated their clean energy transition. Unless you're a coal magnate, delusional or a Xitter troll, that is excellent news.

      It also is accelerating the move away from the dollar as the world reserve currency. This is not good news for Usians, is neutral for some, and very positive for some others, so one's outlook on this may vary.

      Basically, if you can get Stumpy McDipshit to believe his ego is wrapped up in something, there's a very good chance you can get him to kill it, lik

    • Well we can quit spending all that money on military bases in the Middle East, because they're no longer feasible to maintain.
      Nope, that's not going to happen. What will happen is we funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into defense contractors pockets to solve the problem, which they don't.

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      some not at all negligible part of the world is substantially better off.

      there is no question that this war falls squarely on trump. however, it has been brewing for decades. he's just the buffoon who pulled the trigger and is going to take full blame. but many, many other reptiles are really to blame. if for some reason you want to blame potuses only, those glorified stewards, you can blame every single one since pretty much eisenhower, possibly with the exception of jfk. but you will still be missing a lo

      • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @06:50PM (#66341654) Homepage

        there is no question that this war falls squarely on trump. however, it has been brewing for decades. he's just the buffoon who pulled the trigger and is going to take full blame.

        No, DT is completely responsible here. Let me remind you of the history. Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran-- the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action:-- in which they would agree not to continue working on isotope enrichment to develop a nuclear bomb, and they agreed to an international team of inspectors who could examine their nuclear facilities at any time, without prior notice. When DT got into office in 2018 he pulled the United States out of the Iran deal, and, guess what, the Iranians restarted their isotope enrichment program. In his second term, trying to get headlines to distract from other failures of policy, DT attacked Iran, saying that he needed to stop them from developing nuclear weapons. It is now pretty clear that there is no possibility of Iran EVER agreeing again to inspections; there is no way that we will ever get an agreement as good as the one that DT tore up. And Iran's attitude now is that they need to develop a nuclear bomb,

        We should have quit while we were ahead, and let Iran go to hell in their own way. But that might have allowed Obama to take credit, and one thing DT can't stand is anybody other than him taking credit for anything.

        • by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @08:06PM (#66341738)

          No, DT is completely responsible here.

          indeed. pretty much all you said is factual. however ...

          But that might have allowed Obama to take credit, and one thing DT can't stand is anybody other than him taking credit for anything.

          while there is no denying his obvious responsibility, that's a speculation on his motives. mine would be that it makes sense the voices that ordered him to trash the jpcoa would be the same voices whispering in his ear 8 years later to press the button. whoever they really are, these voices have been whispering to many potuses to great effect and all have played along but none until trump was crazy or weak enough to tackle the final boss. this has been a very, very long quest, rushing through iraq, syria, lybia, lebanon. so you can blame the pawn for making a dumb move, but you should pay attention to who is playing the bigger game. anyway ... looks like a wipe to me for now.

          We should have quit while we were ahead, and let Iran go to hell in their own way.

          "we" (i'm european, but europeans are complicit so ...) should have left western asia alone half a century ago to begin with. "being ahead" most of that time really meant profiting and controlling all that time, because we could. and "we" had no trouble framing it with humanitarian legalese. but it wasn't working anymore. trump is a tool, but the real news here is that "the us" lost the "colony". this is structural, not the whim of a man. in all its might, the us cannot control that region anymore. not militarily, not with dirty ops, not with tech, not with finance, not with "soft power" (for lack of real diplomacy). the latest hope now seems to be some kind of biblical economic strangling. an old new concept! will see how that works out. i expect miracles there too. well, and then there's nukes, ofc.

          btw why would you wish iran to hell?

          • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

            by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

            btw why would you wish iran to hell?

            The same reason you wished your shift key to hell?

            What a strange way you have of writing. All your punctuation seems to be working except for the one function which does have a redundant set of keys on the keyboard.

            • Maybe he's typing on a model M. Pressing two keys at time takes too much finger muscle strength and he hasn't had his coffee yet.
        • No, DT is completely responsible here. Let me remind you of the history. Obama negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran-- the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action:-- in which they would agree not to continue working on isotope enrichment to develop a nuclear bomb

          The JCPOA capped enrichment to 3.67% until 2030 and imposed stockpile and centrifuge limits. They kept enriching the entire time while respecting agreed upon limits.

          , and they agreed to an international team of inspectors who could examine their nuclear facilities at any time, without prior notice. When DT got into office in 2018 he pulled the United States out of the Iran deal, and, guess what, the Iranians restarted their isotope enrichment program.

          They were enriching the whole time. What changed was the ramp to blow thru agreed upon limits.

          In his second term, trying to get headlines to distract from other failures of policy, DT attacked Iran, saying that he needed to stop them from developing nuclear weapons. It is now pretty clear that there is no possibility of Iran EVER agreeing again to inspections; there is no way that we will ever get an agreement as good as the one that DT tore up. And Iran's attitude now is that they need to develop a nuclear bomb,

          My personal belief after hearing a public statement made by someone on the Iranian side of the JCPOA they were always going for a nuke and JCPOA was seen as a vehicle to that end. It provided the Iranians with sanctions relief giving them money, time

          • after hearing a public statement made by someone on the Iranian side of the JCPOA they were always going for a nuke

            Do you have a citation for that?

    • I guess it depends on how big of a ballistic missile stockpile you wanted them to have when the next conflict started or if they were going share those weapons with their allies. Iran with modern weapons would be a nightmare to deal with. The nature of war is changing and nothing is predictable anymore.
    • by khchung ( 462899 )

      How is the world better off now than it was before this war started?

      The same way after a theft or robbery happened. The theives got richer.

    • How is the world better off now than it was before this war started?

      Seeing regional states like Lebanon and Iraq assert themselves against Iranian terror groups and the possibility of freedom for Iranians themselves.

    • How is the world better off now than it was before this war started?

      We're now one click away from WW3.

    • by 4im ( 181450 )

      _His_ world is a tad better, as people are looking more at gas prices than asking about the Epstein files.

    • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      It would be a LOT better off if the war had gone to plan and the IRGC had been toppled quickly. But wars rarely go to plan, and there is often short term pain as the war is fought.

      Britain and France declared war on Germany in September 1939, a year later in 1940 you could have legitimately asked the same question - how is the world better off now than it was before? It was much worse for Britain and France at that point.

      Looking back now it's obvious how much better off the world is, but in 1940 many people

  • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:11PM (#66341504) Homepage Journal

    The data went from being in the cloud to being in the clouds

  • Maybe it's a benefit if Amazon suddenly lost some data related to me.
  • Backups? You did the backups right?

    How utterly unimpressive that is for a 'data center'.

    • by CEC-P ( 10248912 )
      Steve, the crowd is magic. You don't get it.
      Just kidding, you're just renting 1 server except you don't know where it is and have no control over it.
      • by r1348 ( 2567295 )

        Can your on-premise solution survive the simultaneous bombardment of multiple sites hundreds of kilometers apart?

        • backup your data to maybe an on-premise backup dump for your cloud.

        • I would probably be dead in that instance and not really caring anymore. The cloud however, was supposed to be impervious. Especially, I would have thought with regard to Amazon customer data. How to get cash if your customer data gets bombed etc
          • The "cloud" has the "potential" to be impervious. Like all things in IT it comes down to how much you are willing to spend. resiliency is available locally and remotely in cloud regions for both AWS and Azure. But it isn't free. If you don't pay to have your data in multiple locations then it is not much better than having it on prem.
          • by r1348 ( 2567295 )

            Full disclosure: I was an AWS engineer up until last August, and directly supported the local technicians who worked on the recovery effort in Bahrain and UAE after the bombardments. I was literally directing their operations while connected to their live bodycams in the damaged datacenters. Without going too much into details, Iran was issuing warnings hours before the bombings to give us time to evacuate. We had 0 casualties, to everybody's relief. So you would survive a similar event.

    • To be fair sand is rough on floppy drives.

    • I guess Bezos missed "world backup day".
    • Re:Backups? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @08:42PM (#66341748)

      Backups and georedundancy are customer responsibility. And they get told that. Whoever lost data in this is incompetent and did it to themselves.

      To be fair, there are a LOT of incompetent people out there and that is the reason why AWS tried recovery in the first place.

  • by CEC-P ( 10248912 ) on Thursday September 17, 2026 @05:38PM (#66341558)
    "It's the cloud! It's everywhere! It's distributed!" - dumb people who use AWS
    "Yeah, it's on like one server. Pay us more money lol" - Amazon.
    • "It's the cloud! It's everywhere! It's distributed!" - dumb people who use AWS

      Yeah, but they aren't wrong. As a result of this attack the data is now more distributed than ever before, some of it even outside of the Amazon facility's fence.

    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      "It's the cloud! It's everywhere! It's distributed!" - dumb people who use AWS "Yeah, it's on like one server. Pay us more money lol" - Amazon.

      Yep, pretty much this.

      When you have a physical datacentre, you take backup off site in case the site fails, when you're in the cloud you're really just in one physical location unless you're paying through the nose for co-location.

      "Cloud" has pretty much taken the LCC (Low Cost Carrier, A.K.A. Budget Airlines) model to compute and Amazon is the Ryanair of that world. Sure, they advertise a £19 flight to Magaluf but want a seat that isn't shit, pony up, want to take luggage, gonna cost you, don'

  • At the very least you need to select it and pay for it. Same as backups to some other cloud.

    Hence I have zero compassion for whoever lost data here, they did it so themselves by being incompetent.

    To be fair, cloud administration (as a customer) is harder than administration of your own on-prem systems. I think many do not understand that.

  • Surely the customers had backups, offline, right?
    Otherwise the data could not have been THAT important!!

  • At the scale Amazon's working at, how much more difficult and costly is it to have your offsite backups on a different continent, versus merely a neighbouring country/state? I assume someone competent decided that having UAE backups in Bahrain were "good enough" compared to, say, Australia.

  • Because once again, hiring a "cloud" vendor and then storing your data in just one remote datacenter is not a smart thing to do.

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