Amazon: Iranian Drones Destroyed Customer Data

Amazon has finally confirmed that after drone attacks targeted its data centers in the Middle East during Iran's war, some customer data has been permanently lost. According to Cybernews, six months after the attacks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that its efforts to recover stored data […]

Amazon has finally confirmed that some customer data has been lost forever after drone strikes targeted its data centers in the Middle East during the Iran war.

According to Cybernews (cybernews), 6 months after these attacks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it has ended its efforts to recover data stored in parts of its cloud infrastructure in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, because the extent of the damage was too great.

In effect, some customers have also been told to rebuild their infrastructure elsewhere, and AWS has offered to support moving them to alternative geographies.

In early March, Iranian drone strikes targeted AWS data centers in the Middle East. In the United Arab Emirates with the code me-central-1, two centers were directly targeted by drone attacks.

Amazon reported that two "Availability Zones" coded mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 are still severely disrupted, while the third zone, mec1-az1, remained immune from attacks. However, some services dependent on the affected areas were still affected.

In another report, Ambassador Arjan also wrote that in Bahrain, an area that AWS introduces with the code me-south-1, a drone hit near one of the company's centers, causing structural damage and disrupting electricity supply. In the following weeks, in April, another availability zone in the island region was disrupted, resulting in a complete outage of Amazon Web services in the region.

Amazon Web (AWS) typically relies on redundancy between multiple centers to keep services running in the event of a single center failure.

However, according to updates posted on the AWS Service Status page, the damage to several different sites overwhelmed backup systems designed to handle a single facility outage, leaving them unable to handle the situation.

In a September 15th status update, Amazon Web confirmed that some of the data was permanently lost: "We are unable to restore access to resources and data that were hosted exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone."

Amazon added, "We are still working to restore regional resources, as well as regional resources hosted in the other affected Availability Zones, mec1-az1 and mec1-az3."

However, AWS said in an update on Bahrain, published in the same announcement, that the damage was so extensive that it was impossible to recover the data.

"The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple availability zones and exceeded the level that our regional and multi-zone services are designed to withstand," the statement said.

AWS status update in Bahrain

Amazon also added, "After a thorough evaluation, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to resources and data that were hosted exclusively in this region."

According to Amazon, "When the first availability zone was affected in March, we began recommending that customers move their workloads to other zones, and most did so before the zone became unavailable after the second availability zone was disrupted in April."