That depends on the data. If this is EBS or single-AZ S3, then from Amazon's perspective this was correct. Backup responsibly (for any data that does need to be backed up) lives with the customer, and Amazon has no way of knowing about that. EBS data data is unrecoverable, and that's what's reported.

Now if this was multi-AZ S3 or whatever then this would be significant.

The article does not tell us what products were impacted.

The more dramatic contingency you have to plan for, the more expensive the plan gets.

Earlier this week I mentioned that if we lose enough data centres to bring our operation down, the first items in the to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.

Offsite to.. where? Sea? Data residency in Gulf states is very strict and basically nothing is leaving the countries

If you had data at two facilities in different countries hundreds of miles apart (about 250 miles between Dubai and Bahrain), that would count as offsite backup most of the time.

Certainly, this event will inform people's disaster recovery plans, but when you're also looking at data residency requirements, small countries, and state level military action against your hosting provider, it can be hard to keep your data.

But that is something the customer needs to consider. AWS doesnt offer that as standard if your data is in one zone, and during a war even multiple zones in the same region may not be sufficient.

Nothing is ever real-time. Eventual consistency leads to some data are not backed up.

You talking as if this is some mom-and-pop shop that you run.

That isn't recovery from AWS's point of view. If the customer has data in another region, thats great for them but AWS isn't really a part of that, AWS doesn't know which data is fungible in every case. Sure they have some data is replicated, what they can't recover is the data THEY do not replicate.

Did local laws permit?

You apparently don't do business out here with the unwashed masses where "whadda mean with all that nonsense? It's cloud...it's by definition safe[1][2]!" is an all too common preconception.

[1] That's a quote, including the Boston accent. [2] The only one I had that was better was a C-level who said "why are you asking for all this money for security in Azure. It's Microsoft so it's already secure.". That, too, is a quote.

Not all data is allowed to leave all countries.

If a AWS customer chooses to store their data in a single AZ, that is a design choice. AWS is not taking a daily copy of a entire regions S3 cluster and driving it to some warehouse for a "just in case" situation. That is why Multi-AZ exists.