Tapes offsite? Nah, we go fast and break things here!
The whole point of AWS Availability Zones (AZ) is that if one location goes out, you still have data elsewhere and it would automagically recover. The default for services in one Region is 3 AZs. Some regions like us-east-1 have 6 AZs.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/
From their own map, it looks like both Bahrain and UAE had 3 AZs.
Amazon also recommends storing data across at least 3 AZs to avoid data loss.
So either customers actively turned off multi-AZ support, someone screwed up the local installation, or EVERY single one of those AZs got hit.
Edit: article is paywalled, but there’s a small section that says multiple AWS locations were hit in Bahrain.
Let me guess…it’ll be files related to corporate crimes.
