Amazon has finally said out loud what customers in the Middle East feared for months: some of their data is not coming back.
The company confirmed this week that it cannot restore anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain region, known internally as me-south-1. Fighting during the US war with Iran damaged the physical data centers that made up the region, and Amazon said the destruction spread across multiple availability zones, more than its systems could survive. A single availability zone went down first in March. Amazon told customers to move their workloads elsewhere, and most did, but a second zone collapsed in April and pulled the entire region down with it.
The United Arab Emirates suffered a similar blow. Amazon says it cannot recover one of the three availability zones in its UAE region either, after drones struck two AWS facilities there in March during Iran’s retaliation against US and Israeli strikes. The company is still working to recover the other two zones and says most affected customers have already restarted operations elsewhere by restoring from backups or pulling whatever data survived.
What makes this notable is not just the damage itself, but what it says about a myth the cloud industry has spent years selling: that spreading workloads across availability zones makes them nearly indestructible. That protection works for equipment failures, power outages, even most natural disasters. It does not work when an entire geographic region becomes a war zone. Amazon has always maintained that surviving a region-wide loss requires backups stored somewhere else entirely, and this is exactly the scenario that advice anticipated.
Amazon and several other cloud providers told customers early on to replicate whatever they could into other regions, ideally in Europe, rather than hope Middle East infrastructure would come back online quickly. Given what just happened, that call looks like the right one.
Support teams remain available to help affected customers migrate to other regions, though Amazon declined to add anything beyond its health dashboard when reporters asked for further comment.
