Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers

Amazon Web Services revealed that its cloud data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (regions ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1) suffered significant damage from Iranian drone strikes that occurred two months ago. An April 30 status update stated that full restoration of normal operations will likely take several more months, meaning the entire recovery could span nearly half a year. AWS initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026, an estimated $150 million hit, and has since suspended billing for affected customers. The company strongly recommends that clients migrate resources to other regions and rely on remote backups.

The internal damage report obtained by Business Insider details the extent of the harm: 14 EC2 cloud server racks were knocked offline at one facility, plus impacts to five additional server racks. EC2 is AWS's core service for virtual servers and scalable computing. The report also cites flooding and water damage from activated fire suppression systems, as well as mechanical failures in cooling systems. Some customers, such as Dubai-based super app Careem, managed to restore services within hours by migrating workloads overnight to other data centers. The incident has broader implications: London-based Pure Data Centre Group announced it will pause Middle East data center investments until the regional conflict subsides, signaling growing wariness about infrastructure security in the region.