me-south-1

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.