AWS has confirmed that it is unable to restore access to certain resources and data in Bahrain and one Availability Zone in the UAE due to physical damage affecting its cloud infrastructure.
According to a recent update on September 15, AWS stated that it has exhausted all options for recovering data and resources that were not transferred before the Middle East (Bahrain) Region became unavailable. In the UAE, access to resources and data hosted exclusively in Availability Zone mec1-az2 cannot be restored.
The Bahrain Region, known as me-south-1, consists of three Availability Zones. The outages originated in March when AWS infrastructure in Bahrain and the UAE sustained damage during strikes. The incidents resulted in physical harm to the cloud infrastructure and service disruptions in both countries.
Following the damage to the first Bahrain Availability Zone, AWS advised customers to relocate workloads to other Regions. Most customers had already migrated before the second Availability Zone in Bahrain became unavailable in April, as reported by Reuters.
AWS evaluated the impacted Bahrain infrastructure and concluded that it had no further options for restoring resources and data that were not moved prior to the region becoming inaccessible. Remaining customers have received assistance in restoring operations elsewhere using available backups or alternative recovery methods.
In the UAE, AWS’s Middle East Region, identified as me-central-1, also comprises three Availability Zones. While AWS is working on recovering resources across the broader UAE Region and its other affected Availability Zones, it is unable to restore access to resources and data exclusively hosted in mec1-az2. Affected customers are being supported in re-establishing operations in alternative Regions using available backups or other recovery measures.
The outages had a ripple effect on services beyond AWS, with banking operations being among the services disrupted since March.
For more information on disaster recovery strategies and AWS’s shared-responsibility model, please refer to the original article.
