AWS Says Some Middle East Cloud Data Is Lost for Good After Iranian Strikes

The first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, after which AWS advised customers to move their workloads elsewhere. The company said most had done so before additional attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and took the entire Region offline.

AWS reached the same conclusion for one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates, mec1-az2, one of three in its UAE Region. The company said it cannot re-establish access to data hosted there, but is continuing recovery work on resources in the other affected Zones, mec1-az1 and mec1-az3. Two AWS facilities in the country were struck by drones in March as Iran retaliated against US-Israeli strikes.

Tom's Hardware, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that more than six months after the attacks the company has not offered a timeline for when either location will return to service. Tom's Hardware also noted that the UAE has spent years positioning itself as a data-processing hub, and that OpenAI had been expected to take 20% of the capacity in a 5-gigawatt data center complex, though the WSJ reported no lease had been signed more than a year later.

Synergy Research finds Northern Virginia alone hosts nearly 12% of global hyperscale capacity, with US builds now moving inland to states like Indiana and Tennessee.