AWS unable to restore data hosted solely in damaged Middle East zones: redundancy is not a backup
Amazon Web Services has reported that it cannot restore resources and data hosted exclusively in its Bahrain region or a specific Emirates availability zone, both damaged during the conflict with Iran. A real-world case redefining cloud risk.
News summary
Amazon Web Services has informed its clients via its status dashboard that it is unable to restore access to resources and data hosted exclusively in the Middle East (Bahrain) me-south-1 region, nor in the mec1-az2 availability zone of the Emirates region, following damage sustained during the conflict with Iran. For Bahrain, AWS acknowledges that the damage spanned several zones and exceeded what its regional and multi-zone services are designed to withstand.
This is an unusual occurrence: most cloud incidents are resolved with delayed recovery rather than permanent loss. In this instance, those who stored their data solely in that region find there is nothing to recover if they did not have a copy elsewhere.
The lesson is both technical and straightforward: multi-zone high availability protects against the failure of a single data centre, but not against an event affecting an entire region. Redundancy keeps the service running; a backup, separated geographically and logically, allows for recovery when everything else fails.
For a Spanish company, a war scenario may seem remote, but the principle applies equally to fires, floods, massive provider errors, or ransomware that encrypts everything accessible. The 3-2-1 rule —three copies, two formats, one outside the main environment— remains fully valid in the cloud.
Source: InfoQ — 21 September 2026
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is using multiple availability zones not enough?
- It protects against the failure of one data centre, but not against an event affecting the entire region, as has occurred in Bahrain. For that, a backup in another location is required.
- Is the cloud provider responsible for my backups?
- Under the shared responsibility model, the provider guarantees its infrastructure, but the protection and backup of customer data is typically the responsibility of the customer themselves.
Concepts mentioned in this article: Cloud · Data centre · Redundancy · High availability · Backup · 3-2-1 rule
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