AWS stops billing Middle East customers as war damage repairs stretch for months
Image: Primary Amazon Web Services has suspended billing for customers in its Middle East cloud regions and warned that repairs to war-damaged data centers will take several more months.
The disruption stems from Iranian drone strikes that targeted three Amazon facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain two months ago. In an April 30 update, AWS said its ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 regions suffered damage and remain unable to support customer applications. The company strongly recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore inaccessible data.
Amazon initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. The latest announcement suggests the billing suspension will continue throughout the restoration period, meaning affected customers may pay nothing for cloud services for roughly half a year in total.
Some customers moved quickly to minimize disruption. Dubai-based super app Careem, which offers ride-hailing, food delivery, and household services, completed an overnight migration to alternative servers and restored operations.
The incident highlights the physical vulnerabilities of global cloud infrastructure in conflict zones and the operational tradeoffs providers face when geopolitical violence spills directly into data center real estate.
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This story was sourced from Ars Technica and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.
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