Amazon’s cloud customers will have to wait several months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone attacks targeting three Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain – meaning it could take almost half a year overall to fully recover from the cloud disruption.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update detailing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations,” a process “expected to take several months.”
That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions—ME-Central-1 and ME-South-1, as it had initially waived all usage-related charges for through March 2026, at an estimated cost of $150 million.
AWS also “strongly” recommended that customers move resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” Some customers, such as Dubai-based super app Careem — which offers ride-hailing, home services, and food and grocery delivery — were able to come back online quickly after an overnight stay on another data center server.
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