War damage to data centers exceeded what AWS services are designed to withstand.

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.

Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone. Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers.

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[–] 232 points 1 month ago (3 children)

The only way to get them to delete your data.

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  • [–] 182 points 1 month ago*

    Me: "please delete my data"
    Amazon: "Lol no"
    Iran "I got you babe"

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  • [–] 175 points 1 month ago (10 children)

    the cloud is much more secure because your data is decentralized

    • Every major cloud provider when advertising their services over on-prem soloutions.
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    [–] 66 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    "We don't need our own backups. The cloud takes care of everything."

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    [–] 58 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    Never thought I'd be a cheerleader for Iran against my own country. But please, Iran, keep making America better!

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    [–] 56 points 1 month ago (14 children)

    Anyone in IT who has ever been near a backup or had to do a DR exercise knows full well not to have a backup in the same geographic area as your primary workload. Usually it’s for natural disasters, but it very much applies to war too.

    This is just as much, if not more, on the companies that didn’t have geographicly dispersed backups.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (9 children)

    I think pretty much every software dev has used AWS at some time, and when you set up new services, it specifically warns you to use multiple geographic areas for your services. It doesn't say "war" or something, only that it's good for redundancy, IIRC.

    So anyway, yes, I follow instructions, but I'm always surprised that you have software people and systems admins who can't even follow basic instructions. I don't know what percentage of people it is, but it feels like over 50% who can't follow even the simplest instructions.

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    [–] 52 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if a bombing on US territory was cheered if it was an AWS data center (or Meta, xAI, etc). Hell, Iran could probably even find US citizens for sabotage at this point if they just ask, lol.

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    [–] 36 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    War damage to data centers exceeded what AWS services are designed to withstand.

    Well good thing it isn't a war then

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    [–] 35 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Speaking as a member of a company who has just recently realized that we can have products in regions other than us-east-1, this is not surprising. If UE1 went down the economy would collapse overnight

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I've been working on Disaster Recovery for my company and the amount of sleep I'm losing on this is insane in general.

    Our devs just write their own IaC stuff so like, they can provision their own databases and shit without us knowing with no backups or customer keys and stuff to back up properly.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago

    It's incredibly hard to reign that behavior in once it's entrenched as well.

    You basically gotta take away privileges from everyone and it becomes a huge fight if you don't have organizational support. Usually you have to wait for something to explode spectacularly for that to happen.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    Fellow SRE here.

    The number of times I've heard "we have replication" followed by "we've tested it...on paper" make me cry.

    Trying to convince a CEO that the only way to know for sure that their backups work is to do an actual disaster test is harder than trying to convince my parents that I don't need to eat more.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    Our devs just write their own IaC stuff so like, they can provision their own databases and shit without us knowing with no backups or customer keys and stuff to back up properly.

    That'd give me nightmares too on top of the DR, hopefully at the minimum they can't spin up resources in anything but a dev/test environment.

    Best of luck to you, governance is super important, if it makes you feel any better you're definitely not alone.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Do they have a Go Fund Me or something I can donate to or something to keep them rolling?

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    [–] 21 points 1 month ago

    Fuck yes, keep doing that please.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 month ago

    Iran out here doing everyone a favor

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago

    2+1 isn't this building and the neighboring building. No back up no compassion. (Kein Backup kein Mitleid)

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago

    That's one way to delete your Amazon account I suppose.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Good. Fuck Amazon, sucks for the customers. Also what kind of company like this doesn't have backups?

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago

    AWS makes so much cash that they won't even leave the region

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago
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    [–] 10 points 1 month ago

    Oh no, not amazons marketing data!

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    Someone needs to shine a laser at bezos' noggin for a better permanent loss.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    So like... the opposite of a data breach, the headlines I am used to reading about "customer data"? Hmmm... Ok.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    Making me wanna Inshallah up

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    3,2,1 applies to cloud regions, so everyone who lost their data permanently deserved it.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    No great loss.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago

    Do it again. Harder!

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  • [–] 7 points 1 month ago

    Finally! Data getting "lost" instead of "stolen". /s

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago
    [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    Oh no, ... anyway, don't have Amazon account

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    good. more. do more.

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