AWS Data Centers in UAE and Bahrain to Take Months to Repair After Iranian Drone Strikes
Amazon Web Services says full restoration of Middle East cloud regions could take nearly half a year following damage from Iranian attacks
نظرة سريعة
- Amazon Web Services said its data centers in the UAE and Bahrain will require several more months to repair after Iranian drone strikes damaged facilities in March 2026.
- The AWS regions ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-CENTRAL-1 remain unable to support customer applications, with full recovery potentially taking up to six months.
- Billing operations remain suspended during restoration, after AWS waived $150 million in March charges.
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Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more 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 strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing 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” in a process that “is 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—after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also “strongly” recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.”
Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem—which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery—were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.
The fact that AWS expects the full restoration of cloud services to potentially take half a year speaks to the damage inflicted by the Iranian drone strikes. Business Insider previously obtained an internal document that described damage to one data center knocking 14 EC2 cloud server racks offline, in addition to impacting five other server racks. EC2 represents the core AWS service for companies needing virtual servers and scalable computing capacity.
The document also detailed flooding and water damage from the activation of fire suppression systems at one of the AWS data centers and mechanical failures in the facility’s cooling systems.
The latest AWS status update comes just after another data center developer, the London-based Pure Data Centre Group, said it will pause Middle East data center investments until the ongoing Middle East conflict subsides. The war began on February 28, with US and Israeli attacks on Iran triggering retaliatory Iranian strikes across the region. It has since settled into an uneasy ceasefire period with dueling naval blockades of the Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint as a growing economic and energy crisis spreads across the world.
