- Sources: DatacenterDynamics report, HN submission
- Summary: DatacenterDynamics, in a report dated 2026-09-16, says AWS provided undated status updates stating that resources and data held exclusively in me-south-1, or exclusively in the mec1-az2 availability zone of me-central-1, cannot be restored. The report attributes the loss to physical damage: the Bahrain and UAE facilities were struck by Iranian drones during the US-Israel-Iran conflict, with a second attack on Bahrain claimed by the IRGC in July. The Bahrain statement is the one saying the damage exceeded what its regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand, while for the UAE, AWS says it continues to work on recovering regional resources and the mec1-az1 and mec1-az3 zones. AWS says it is replacing the affected infrastructure, will update on restoration in the coming months, and will share its plans for Bahrain in early 2027. An Amazon spokesperson told DatacenterDynamics that reading the updates as a decision not to reopen the sites contradicts them, then declined to say whether the sites reopen with new hardware or as new facilities. The report predates this page and the Hacker News thread resurfaced on 2026-09-19.
- Why it matters: Any recovery plan that treats an AWS region as the durability boundary has to be re-derived from cross-region copies, because AWS now states in-region data is gone rather than delayed.
- Follow-up: Track the restoration update AWS says is coming and the Bahrain plans promised for early 2027.
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