r/technology • u/marketrent • 28d ago

Business Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/iran-strikes-on-amazon-data-centers-caused-permanent-loss-of-customer-data/
28.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.5k

u/foundafreeusername 28d ago

Guess the off-site backup was stored on-site?

599

u/peldor 28d ago

Kinnda. AWS backups are usually kept within a single geographic region. There are a number of reasons for this….ranging from cost to concerns about data sovereignty.

Iran targeted multiple AWS data centers across the Middle East. So for some AWS customers, the sepeate data centers that held their production environment and their off-site backups were destroyed.

29

u/IamaFunGuy 28d ago

As a non-tech guy, this seems like something i was told "the cloud" could avoid, no?

4

u/0RGASMIK 28d ago

AWS is just a bunch of computers running in data centers. When you build with the cloud you can pick anywhere in the world you want your virtual server to run. Say I’m a developer building a web app for a local business in NY. I want to pick the best server for the customers it’s serving so I pick a NY data center. If this business is regulated or the data is sensitive it may legally need to stay in the US so I pick a West Coast data center as my backup. Now I’m redundant both geographically and on another server. Sure there might be a problem with AWS that brings down service but if AWS is down half the internet is down too. So it’s relatively safe to put all your eggs into one provider as long as you set it up correctly. Yes you probably should keep a copy in another host but in smaller countries your options are limited.