AWS Waives $150 Million After Middle East Data Center Damage, Repairs to Take Months

*TL;DR: Amazon waives $150 million in usage fees for March 2026 after drone attacks damage its UAE and Bahrain data centers; full service restoration may not occur for several months.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed that the March 2026 billing cycle for its Middle East regions will be free of usage charges, estimating the waiver at $150 million. The decision follows drone strikes that hit three data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, leaving the ME‑CENTRAL‑1 and ME‑SOUTH‑1 regions offline.

AWS posted an update on April 30 stating that the affected cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and cannot support customer applications. The company added that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations,” a process it expects to take several months.

The outage forced customers to relocate workloads. Careem, a Dubai‑based super app offering ride‑hailing, food delivery and household services, migrated its workloads overnight to other AWS servers and resumed service quickly. AWS advises all customers to move resources to alternative regions and rely on remote backups to recover any data that became inaccessible.

The repair timeline suggests a half‑year horizon before the damaged sites return to full capacity. During this period, AWS will continue to suspend billing for the impacted regions, extending the financial relief beyond the initial March waiver.

What it means: Enterprises using AWS in the Middle East must plan for longer‑term reliance on secondary regions, potentially increasing latency and costs. The $150 million waiver underscores the scale of the disruption, while the extended repair window highlights the vulnerability of centralized cloud infrastructure in conflict zones. Companies will watch AWS’s progress on rebuilding the sites and any further compensation measures.

What to watch next: Updates on the physical repair of the UAE and Bahrain data centers and any changes to AWS’s regional redundancy policies.