AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning
On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation.
This is the story of a catastrophic internal mistake at AWS MENA, a 20-day support nightmare where I couldn’t get a straight answer to “Does my data still exist?”, and what it reveals about trusting cloud providers with your data.
Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy:
Ten years. That’s how long I’d been an AWS customer. A decade of using AWS as my testbed—spinning up instances to validate deployments for the Ruby gems I maintain like capistrano-puma and capistrano-sidekiq. Nothing production-critical, but essential for open-source development.
On my birthday, AWS gave me a present I’ll never forget: proof that no amount of redundancy matters when the provider itself goes rogue.
