amazon-web-servicesamazon-s3

Assets in AWS S3 bucket blocked in Iran


I have a bucket where I store some images and short clips to use inside my app. but I've noticed that users in Iran cannot see the images and watch the videos without using a proxy.

Is there any solution that those people be able to see images and watch the videos?

My bucket is public, located within the Asia Pacific (Singapore) ap-southeast-1 region.


Solution

  • Is there any solution that those people be able to see images and watch the videos?

    No, unfortunately.

    In compliance with (extreme) United States government sanctions & export control regulations, Amazon Web Services prohibits access to customers located within Iran.

    Amazon Web Services is theoretically exempted from US sanctions targeting Iran according to the Iran General License (No. D-1) issued by the US Treasury.

    However in practice, Amazon is over-complying with the sanctions, unfortunately crippling access for Iranian customers.

    Due to the extremely high number of sanctions that apply to doing business with Iran, US based businesses simply do not take risks and would rather block off access completely than allow it on a case-by-case basis.

    AWS falls within this category, as do virtually all other US companies e.g. PayPal (ZarinPal), Uber (Snapp!) & eBay (Digikala) to name a few.

    If you're providing an international service, Cloudflare as a CDN will work. Popular Iranian websites like hamyarwp.com use Cloudflare and are still accessible within Iran.

    If you're providing a local service, local Iranian hosting is the best way to move forward to guarantee access.

    For object storage, perhaps try out Google Cloud Storage.