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InfoQSteef-Jan Wiggers5 min readintermediate

AWS Cannot Restore Data Held Only in Damaged Middle East Availability Zones

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Summary

AWS admitted it cannot recover data that was stored only in the damaged Availability Zones of its Middle East (UAE) and Bahrain regions after Iranian drone strikes. The outage highlights that AWS’s multi‑AZ guarantees only protect against localized failures, not regional destruction, and that customers must implement cross‑region replication to meet durability and data‑residency requirements.

  • AWS multi‑AZ design protects against failures within ~100 km, but not against coordinated attacks that take out multiple AZs in a region.
  • S3 durability (99.999999999% per year) is a regional guarantee; it does not cover loss of an entire region.
  • Customers are responsible for replicating backups to another region to survive regional catastrophes, per AWS DR guidance and the shared‑responsibility model.
  • Regulatory data‑residency rules can prevent cross‑region copies, leaving data unrecoverable if the sole region is destroyed.

Many teams assume that using AWS alone provides protection against any disaster. This event shows that without a multi‑region strategy, data can be permanently lost, especially when legal constraints forbid moving data abroad.

5/10
securitycloudawsdisaster recoverydata residencymulti az

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