AWS confirmed the irretrievable loss of customer data after the attack on the data center

Company Amazon Web Services officially acknowledged the fact of irretrievable loss of customer data stored in data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. The incident was a consequence of a series of physical attacks using drones that took place from March 1 to July of this year.

According to the AWS Health Dashboard report, the damage to the infrastructure was critical for a number of computing powers. As a result of the incident, a large-scale project specializing in the development of artificial intelligence systems was affected. According to available data, due to the impossibility of ensuring the preservation of information, the contract for renting computing powers with OpenAI was temporarily suspended.

The attacks affected physical communication nodes and server racks, which led to a violation of the integrity of data arrays stored in regional clusters. AWS technical specialists confirmed that it is impossible to recover the lost information segments due to the physical destruction of media and associated power infrastructure in the affected data center sectors.

This case demonstrates a new category of risks for cloud providers, where the threat comes not from software vulnerabilities, but from direct impact on physical objects. Previously, such incidents were considered mainly in the context of cybersecurity, but the current situation forces a revision of the protocols for protecting the physical perimeter of data centers that support high-load AI projects.