Amazon's cloud customers face an extended wait as the company anticipates several more months of repairs for its war-damaged data centers in the Middle East. This follows Iranian drone strikes two months ago on three Amazon data centers located in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, indicating that full recovery from the cloud disruption could span nearly half a year.
An April 30 update on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard confirmed that its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are currently unable to support customer applications. The update also stated that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations,” a process “expected to take several months.”
This suggests AWS will continue to suspend billing for customers in the affected ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 regions. Previously, Amazon had already waived all usage-related charges for March 2026, at an estimated cost of $150 million.
AWS also “strongly” recommended that customers migrate resources to alternative cloud regions and utilize remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” Notably, the Dubai-based super app Careem, which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery, successfully resumed operations quickly by performing an overnight migration to other data center servers.