May 5, 2026 Amazon Web Services says customers in the Middle East will face several more months of disruption after data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes. Full recovery could take nearly half a year, extending outages that have already persisted for two months.
In an April 30 update, AWS confirmed that its UAE (ME-CENTRAL-1) and Bahrain (ME-SOUTH-1) regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are still unable to support customer applications. The company said billing operations remain suspended while restoration work continues, signalling that affected customers will not be charged during the extended recovery period.
The scale of the disruption reflects significant physical damage. Internal reporting previously indicated that one site lost 14 EC2 server racks, with additional racks impacted, while fire suppression systems triggered flooding that damaged infrastructure. Cooling system failures compounded the issue, affecting the reliability of core compute capacity in facilities designed to support high-availability workloads.
AWS has urged customers to shift workloads to other regions and rely on backups to recover inaccessible data. Some organisations have already executed rapid migrations. Dubai-based Careem restored services by moving operations to alternative AWS regions overnight, highlighting both the resilience of multi-region architectures and the operational burden placed on customers during outages.
The incident underscores how geopolitical risk is increasingly intersecting with cloud infrastructure. The damage followed Iranian drone strikes targeting facilities in the region as part of a broader conflict that began in late February, disrupting critical infrastructure and supply routes. While a ceasefire has reduced immediate escalation, instability in the region continues to affect operations and investment decisions.
That impact is already visible beyond AWS. Pure Data Centre Group has paused planned investments in Middle East infrastructure, citing ongoing uncertainty.
For AWS customers, the incident is a practical test of cloud redundancy strategies. While hyperscale providers typically promote geographic distribution and failover capabilities, the prolonged outage highlights limits when entire regions become unavailable due to external factors rather than internal system failures.
The extended recovery timeline also raises questions about how cloud providers price and insure against geopolitical disruptions. AWS waived usage charges for March 2026, estimated at around $150 million, and continues to suspend billing.
