AWS has confirmed that some cloud resources and data hosted in the Middle East have been permanently lost following damage sustained during the recent US-Iran war. The admission means customers who did not migrate their workloads in time following earlier attacks now have no way of recovering data stored exclusively in the affected locations, underlining the limits of even AWS's built-in redundancy against region-wide physical destruction.

The Bahrain Region (me-south-1) is now entirely inaccessible after strikes hit a first Availability Zone in March and a second in April, overwhelming the multi-zone redundancy the infrastructure was designed to withstand; AWS says most customers had already heeded its advice to migrate before the second attack. In the UAE, one of three Availability Zones (mec1-az2) has also been declared unrecoverable after drone strikes hit AWS facilities there in March, though the company says it is still working to restore resources in the other two zones. AWS reiterated that customers should rely on disaster recovery plans and backups held in other regions, ideally in Europe, rather than wait for Middle East services to return.