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Amazon’s cloud division is dealing with prolonged disruptions after drone strikes damaged multiple data centres in the Middle East, leaving some services offline for months. The affected facilities in the UAE and Bahrain are expected to take several more months to fully recover, extending the total outage period to nearly half a year.
The incident has impacted key cloud regions operated by Amazon Web Services, which confirmed that infrastructure in both locations suffered significant damage. Customers relying on these regions have been unable to access certain applications and data, as reported by Ars Technica.
According to updates from AWS, billing for affected customers has been temporarily suspended while repairs continue. The company had already waived usage charges for March 2026, with the financial impact estimated at around $150 million. Clients have been advised to migrate workloads to other regions and rely on backups to restore services where possible.
The scale of the disruption reflects the physical damage to critical infrastructure. Internal reports indicate that multiple server racks, including core EC2 systems used for virtual computing, were knocked offline. Additional complications came from water damage caused by fire suppression systems and failures in cooling equipment, both of which are essential for maintaining data centre operations.
Some companies were able to restore functionality quickly by shifting operations to other regions. Dubai based super app Careem reportedly resumed services after an overnight migration. However, not all organizations have the same level of redundancy, leaving some operations partially disrupted.
The situation highlights the vulnerability of centralized cloud infrastructure in conflict zones. While cloud systems are designed for redundancy, physical damage to facilities can still lead to extended outages, especially when multiple sites in a region are affected simultaneously.
The broader impact is also being felt across the data centre industry. At least one major developer has paused planned investments in the Middle East, citing ongoing instability. This could slow the expansion of cloud infrastructure in the region, particularly as demand for computing capacity continues to grow.
The strikes are part of a wider regional conflict that has affected shipping routes and energy markets, adding further pressure on global supply chains. For cloud providers and their customers, the incident underscores the importance of geographic diversification and disaster recovery planning.
