AWS Recovery Timeline Extends to Six Months, $150 Million Waiver Issued

TL;DR: AWS estimates six months to fully restore war‑damaged Middle East data centers and has waived $150 million in March usage fees.

The cloud giant’s latest update confirms that the damage inflicted by Iranian drone strikes on three data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain will keep services offline for months. The disruption, first reported in late March, affects the ME‑CENTRAL‑1 and ME‑SOUTH‑1 regions, which host applications for businesses across the Gulf.

AWS announced that a complete recovery could take about six months. The company’s dashboard, refreshed on April 30, notes that the affected regions cannot support customer workloads and that billing operations remain suspended while repairs proceed. The suspension is expected to continue beyond the initial waiver for March 2026, which Amazon values at $150 million.

To mitigate impact, AWS urged customers to migrate workloads to other regions and to rely on remote backups. Dubai‑based super app Careem demonstrated the recommended approach, moving its services overnight to alternative servers and restoring functionality within hours. The rapid migration highlights that customers with flexible architectures can avoid prolonged downtime.

The financial relief covers all usage‑related charges for March 2026, effectively shielding customers from the immediate cost shock of the outage. By estimating the waiver at $150 million, AWS signals the scale of the disruption while preserving cash flow for affected businesses.

What it means for the market: Enterprises with critical operations in the Gulf must now factor a half‑year recovery window into their continuity plans. Companies that have not yet diversified their cloud footprint face heightened risk of service interruption. AWS’s recommendation to spread workloads across multiple regions may accelerate multi‑region adoption, reshaping cloud deployment strategies in the region.

Watch for updates on the repair schedule and any further billing adjustments as AWS progresses with reconstruction efforts.