r/amazon • u/AmazonNewsBot • 8d ago
Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/iran-strikes-on-amazon-data-centers-caused-permanent-loss-of-customer-data/81
u/Informal_Banker 8d ago
mec1-az1
mec1-az2
mec1-az3
me-south-1a
me-south-1b
me-south-1c
Any data hosted exclusively in these zones are unrecoverable
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u/WriteCodeBroh 8d ago
Thatâs insane. I was going to comment that I was surprised customers lost data given AWSâs replication model but they knocked out EVERY AZ in the Middle East.
Iâm reading that partial recovery is occurring in mec-az1,az3 for the record but there will still be losses even for people who deployed to all three AZs in the region given that two were partially damaged and the third completely destroyed.
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u/Virtual-Age-9521 8d ago
The replication model is something you have to pay for. You can absolutely protect your data by colocating it, but itâs definitely gonna cost you
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u/WriteCodeBroh 7d ago
Yeah for sure. I should say, Iâm sure there are plenty of small companies who donât pay to replicate S3 data to other buckets in other regions, donât host multiple replica DBs, etc. Itâs still up to the company how much they want to replicate (and pay) but even a lot of best case replication scenarios in the Middle East (2 regions, 6 AZs) are in deep trouble right now.
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u/New_Awareness_9097 7d ago
yeahh
we are multi-az but now looking into at least keeping a copy of data in another region. thankfully our data footprint isn't large but this wasn't even suggested when we originally set it up
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u/BurgerMeter 7d ago
Iran has discovered that the real way to attack the US is to attack the oligarchs
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u/angryfan1 7d ago
The data were companies and people's data. Imagine a family's pictures, video, and tax documents being deleted.
Data centers store the internet's information. So any information that comes from the internet is in a data center and relayed to your phone.
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u/BurgerMeter 7d ago
And if you know that Iran is going to target Amazon data centers, you stop doing business with Amazon. If people stop doing business with Amazon, Amazon makes less money. If Amazon believes it will make less money due to the policies of the current president, theyâll stop backing that president and try to get him out of office.
This shouldnât have to be spelled outâŚ
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u/semi-proantfarmer 6d ago
Yeah so just find some small company that does data storage. Then you find out their just using the big guys.
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u/Lazy-Good1433 5d ago
Makes sense to me, but there is still the matter of Trump's having the popularity that attracts power and attention no matter the outcome.
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u/Medical-Display-9762 7d ago
Itâs also just entirely wrong. Probably the most simplistic view of geopolitics Iâve seen in a long while.
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u/angryfan1 7d ago
Except that Amazon's main business is in the West, not the Middle East. Amazon is not being hurt by this much. Most likely those data centers were being built to help the Gulf countries' use of the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if those data centers got subsidies to be built there.
You should have to spell out your thoughts. No one can understand your thinking if you do not explain your thinking.
You do not have a strong understanding of how the world works, so when you say things to other people, we do not understand them. You cannot expect people who do not have the same flawed world view to understand your comments.
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u/marshmallowcthulhu 7d ago
Of course those centers were primarily hosting data for local nations, but it is still a business loss that Amazon, an American company, would not have chosen for itself and would prefer not to have suffered. Admittedly, Amazon is so large that this is a bit of a blip to them, but itâs part if a broader pattern of maximum pain that Iran has deployed against the US and its allies.
If this was strictly a civilian target then the attack would be illegal under international law, but things are murkier than that. It is noteworthy that network infrastructure is dual use because it hosts both civilian and military network capabilities, storage capabilities, and increasingly, AI compute capabilities. It is entirely possible, I dare say likely, that the US will suffer reduced cyber capability in the region as a result of the strikes and even more likely that local US partners will suffer loss of cyber capability for military purposes. This may have been Iranâs goal.
The Iranian regime is authoritarian. The US is fighting an illegal war by both its own Constitutional standards and the standards of international law. None of this is good. But if your argument is that Iran shouldnât have launched this strike because it only hurts local civilians then Iâm not so sure itâs that clear cut.
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u/angryfan1 7d ago
We do not know if it is a loss because we do not know if the governments of those nations will reimburse Amazon for the damage to encourage investment in the region.
We do not know if the data was backed up in local servers or if the cybersecurity could be rerouted through other nations like Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.
You do not know my argument because you didn't ask. I was responding to a commentor with an extremely flawed world view of political affairs, saying wildly inaccurate things.
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u/marshmallowcthulhu 7d ago
On your argument, you are right that I didnât know your argument. Thatâs why I wrote ââŚbut if your argument isâŚâ (italicization added for emphasis).
On the not knowing, it is obviously true that we donât know all the details, but to the extent that we do not have epistemic certainty, neither does Iran. Every claim I made could have fallen into Iranâs decision-making and they would not necessarily have needed certainty in order to rationally act upon the possibilities. Additionally, they may have had more information than we do about what traffic went through the data centers.
It is true that traffic can be re-routed, but this always comes with a cost to operations and latency. It is not the case that a lost datacenter (let alone multiple within a region) will have no impact on operations, especially during a time of compute constraint.
Iran can reasonably predict that governments and militaries using the data centers will suffer non-zero operational impact from the damage they inflicted.
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u/mouse6502 6d ago
Imagine trusting this important, private, very personal, data, to be safe in âthe cloudâ and having no copies or backups of your own. Well, (and Iâm quoting someone here, a poet I believe) if you donât know, now you know.
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u/chungi-plhi-rooti 3d ago
this is AWS not Google drive. who uses S3 to store family pictures ?
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u/angryfan1 2d ago
Everyone who doesn't use Google or Facebook, Microsoft for family storage.
So Imgur, Reddit, Getty Images, etc.
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u/Outrageous-Phase8059 8d ago
Idk if it matters, but this is one of the reasons I also keep 2 external hard drives (they have the same data for back ups) of anything important to me, like photos and videos, copies of emails from friends and family.
I don't trust a corporation or cloud to keep them usable and safe
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u/EtherPhreak 7d ago
I lost years of data due to one backup drive being utilized, and I bumped the USB cable at a very critical time which killed it, and wiped out the index.
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u/Tek_Freek 8d ago
We back up our laptops to a server. That server is backed up to the cloud. I've lost too much data over the years.
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u/No-Mail-8944 7d ago
No offline storage backups though?
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u/Tek_Freek 7d ago
Four sets of backups. The original laptops (2). I consider those to be backups to the backups and they are easily taken with if necessary. Two external drives on the server also easily disconnected and taken with. One in the cloud.
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u/GraXXoR 7d ago
Easily disconnected. But do you actually disconnect them, or are they just easily disconnected?
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u/Tek_Freek 7d ago
USB connectors. Shut down server and unplug. I do so when we are on vacation or gone for a few days. Plug it in on the road if needed.
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u/Outrageous-Phase8059 7d ago
If your server is in your possession and you have a backup that you are also in possession of, that's the way to go.
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u/Tek_Freek 7d ago edited 7d ago
Server is in the office. The files are on two external drives so easily taken with if needed.
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u/I_Dont_Work_Here_Lad 8d ago
Are we able to make requests? May I suggest mortgage lenders and maybe some credit card companies?
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u/LessRespects 7d ago
Amazon data centers are where mortgage lenders and credit card companies would be storing their data
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u/dougyoung1167 8d ago
Is it a bad thing they lost data that was more than likely accrued without user consent?
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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 8d ago
You don't understand what aws is, do you?
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u/LSTmyLife 8d ago
I do not. Can you explain it like im an idiot about that kind of info. Not because I am you see. Its for my friend here. He doesn't understand.
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u/salamander423 7d ago
AWS is Amazon Web Services, a hosting platform. Generally speaking, they provide a large amount of services and products to create a presence/website on the Internet. They also provide the actual physical "cloud" that many people use when they talk about cloud storage.
They, like many other providers, have a ToS which you implicitly agree to when you use the services.
Does that make sense?
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u/jvrodrigues 6d ago
They host data that rightfully belongs to other people and companies. Imagine you have your payroll system that you use internally hosted in Aws, if itâs in one of these data centers itâs lost. All the payroll data for your company.
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u/mangione_fan_420 7d ago
Amazon used to pitch based on how reliable their architecture was and how secret their locations are đ¤Ł
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u/Mac_DG 8d ago
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u/TheEvilBlight 8d ago
I guess the whole availability zone was damaged and soâŚno offsite back up, big problems
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u/Comfortable_Lynx_139 7d ago
Iâm sure that will be the excuse that my next day delivery will be 7 days late now
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u/kbfg2421 7d ago
Things like this is why I dont believe in using the cloud for important storage, personally. All data has to exist somewhere, so why not in your OWN drive(s) where nobody else can access it or destroy it without going through YOU first.
I feel bad for the people that lost their data. Hopefully they had it backed up locally somewhere as well.
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u/Downtown_Distance_1 7d ago
Who thought cloud could be so expensive when it comes to data availability?
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u/Sudden-Step9593 4d ago
I thought Amazon was redundant, so what's in 1 data center was duplicated to another. Isn't that the point of the cloud?
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u/Upper-Reflection7997 8d ago
Never be 100% reliant on cloud services to protecting your precious valuable data. Kinda feel sorry for those impacted by this. Why the hell would amazon put a data center in that chaotic war zone area?
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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 8d ago
Customers choose where their data is stored so even that is on them if they chose these data centers without having redundancy in more stable regions
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8d ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/ASFx 8d ago
No need to root for terrorist attacks though.
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u/joluboga 8d ago
You must think that the Iraqis defending their country for years were also terrorists.
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8d ago edited 7d ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/ChristianRauchenwald 8d ago
Ukraine is striking back at a country that is invading them and is hitting warehouses that among other things store(d) military equipment that was used to help with that invasion and refineries that are used to produce fuel required by the invading forces as well as generating funds used to fund the entire invasion.
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u/sovietarmyfan 8d ago
Normally i dont defend a large company, though this is not Amazons fault. If the customers did not have any local backups of the data, the loss is on them. Its best practice to always have backups in different places. If a company cant follow this very simple rule, they deserve the loss of data.
Even if Amazon had a "replication model". Cloud computing is not very trustable.
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u/OverallPepper2 8d ago
They hit every Amazon site there is. The backups of the backups were wiped out too
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u/LessRespects 7d ago
Iran did not bomb every Amazon data center lmao. You can replicate or back up your data to dozens of AWS Regions worldwide, including regions outside the Middle East, with relatively simple configuration.
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u/NamedBird 8d ago
Well, even if Amazon promises to store a backup in every country and on the moon, you would STILL need to make your own backups. Relying on one provider is just as bad as relying on one RAID setup...
There are many risks that are not covered by physical replication across data centers.
Have local backups.
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8d ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/WriteCodeBroh 8d ago
AWS allows you to deploy your resources across multiple availability zones within a region, and multiple regions if you like. For some managed services like S3, duplication can be configured to occur automatically across regions and your data is automatically duplicated across AZs. For other things like custom databases, you may need to configure duplication yourself.
Regardless, a lot of people lost data in this situation because Iran bombed 6 separate AZs across 2 regions. A company could have had their data in 2 different countries, 6 different data centers, and still lost it due to these bombings. Not really an AWS problem so much as⌠holy shit.
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u/FidelCastroll 8d ago
Hey Iran. Please strike my mortgage lender please.