Amazon Web Services

Amazon Confirms Irrecoverable Data Loss in UAE and Bahrain Data Centers After Drone Attacks

Amazon Web Services has officially confirmed that data stored in specific availability zones within its Middle East regions was permanently destroyed following physical attacks on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. The incidents began on March 1 and continued through April and July, damaging infrastructure tied to AI development projects. In the UAE region mec1, only zone mec1-az2 was completely destroyed with no external backups, while mec1-az3 suffered severe damage and mec1-az1 remained operational but overloaded. All three zones in the Bahrain region me-south-1 were rendered inoperable. AWS had spent six months attempting recovery before issuing the final statement on September 15, 2026, and has advised customers to migrate workloads to unaffected regions. The event highlights growing risks to data from physical-world attacks beyond traditional network threats.

GitHub Experiences Major Global Outage Affecting API, Actions, Copilot and Multiple Core Services

On August 17, GitHub suffered a widespread outage that impacted nearly all major platform functions including the web interface, API, Issues, Pull Requests, Actions, Webhooks, Pages, Git Operations, and Copilot. Approximately 20% of requests to the site and API failed during peak impact, with archive and raw repository content loads reaching around 50% error rates. Corporate authentication mechanisms such as SAML and OIDC, along with SCIM and Team Sync services, were also disrupted while Codespaces remained operational. The incident began around 13:40 UTC with progressive degradation across components, prompting GitHub to identify and mitigate the root cause. Services are gradually recovering but error rates remain slightly elevated, and the incident has not yet been fully closed. Parallel issues were reported in other Microsoft services including Teams and Copilot, with unconfirmed speculation linking the event to Amazon Web Services network problems.