Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers
Amazon’s cloud customers will have to wait several more months before the US technology company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, meaning a full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly six months in total.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard released an update on April 30 describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “have suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also states that “affected billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations” in a process that is “expected to take several months.”
This wording suggests that Amazon will continue to avoid charging AWS customers in the affected regions (ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1) after initially waiving all usage fees for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million.
AWS also “strongly” recommended customers migrate their resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” Some customers, like Dubai-based super app Careem, which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery, were able to get back online quickly after performing an overnight migration to other data center servers.
