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.
“We don’t need our own backups. The cloud takes care of everything.”
People who don’t understand what they are buying almost always find out the hard way.
So like… the opposite of a data breach, the headlines I am used to reading about “customer data”? Hmmm… Ok.
Oh no, not amazons marketing data!
Do they have a Go Fund Me or something I can donate to or something to keep them rolling?
Neither Amazon or Islamic Republic of Iran need your money, friend. Buy yourself a nice hat in stead.
And get it today, with Amazon Prime!
I would but they lost my… custom. By being evil.
Ok, good.
good. more. do more.
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.
I expect Iran already hires Americans for unorganized sabotage, I know both Iran and Russia utilises Telegram to hire teenagers “torpedoes” as they’re called among mobsters.
It’s a fully gangster technique, but it’s effective. One example would be when the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen had two kids attempt to throw a grenade their way in 2024 - It’s proven to be related to Foxtrot (the largest Swedish organised crime syndicate), which Iran has influence on through one of the leaders living in Iran
Nobody will give their life for this, you must use drones for sabotage
Just give any American $1000 and they will be happy to do that.
Lol, I would to be honest. Short the stock for 10k with big leverage, pay 10 americans 1k each to attack a datacenter, get 50k back. But they won’t
Aaaaand this will be the last we hear of ElectricVocalist
lol
Me: “please delete my data”
Amazon: “Lol no”
Iran “I got you babe”The only way to get them to delete your data.
“It’s the only way to be sure.”
the cloud is much more secure because your data is decentralized
- Every major cloud provider when advertising their services over on-prem soloutions.
I mean you’re supposed to use multi-region backups
You have complete choice whether you centralise your data or not.
* But only if you pay for the most redundant storage, which cost all the money.
Yes, storing PBs of tape in collocations is sooooooo much cheaper 🙄
AWS sucks for a lot of reasons none of which are this .
Extra infrastructure costs extra…. Who would have thought?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never thought I’d be a cheerleader for Iran against my own country. But please, Iran, keep making America better!
They didn’t attack US data centers… This hurt the companies in the area. Amazon almost certainly had it all covered by insurance.
I doubt Amazon had any liabiliy here - the contract they make you sign probably says “we’ll try really hard but if we lose your data, it’s your fault.” Microsoft does that with Azure.
I meant the physical hardware destruction, not loss of data.
In sure they don’t pay for that insurance and the rates will remain the same.
Still teaches people to avoid fascist fucker B
Large companies don’t always insure like that. It’s just as likely that Amazon self insures.
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.
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.
I’m not surprised at all. It costs more to use more regions, both due to literal cost and in time to set it up.
The extra time to set up in more regions is pretty trivial, at least in my experience. It’s either an option when setting up the service, or it’s something that you need to cover in any case while documenting how to set up the service. But I suspect the devs I’m complaining don’t read basic instructions also don’t write basic instructions.
As for the monetary cost, that’s a business decision. The devs I am complaining about are not making business decisions. They’re just ignoring basic instructions.
I haven’t used aws for ages but “an option when setting up the service” does not encompass my recollection of it: you can set up (say) S3 in multiple regions, but that doesn’t mean your application can actually make use of multiple regions. It doesn’t mean your vlans actually enable anything to talk between the regions.
I haven’t used it for a while, either, but it was just an option sitting there when using the AWS UI to set up RDS, IIRC.
Right, but how is your application going to handle it if you enable it?
You have to set up your application to use the service, regardless, so I would say that you just have to follow the instructions.
I am not talking about fixing after a service has been set up for only one region, but about following the instructions when first setting it up.
A not insignificant part of my first azure cert covered different redundancy options and pricing. If the data was that critical, the tenants would/should have mirrored it to another region.
“yes but it’s not in the budget this year”
AWS makes so much cash that they won’t even leave the region
