AWS Suspends Middle East Billing as War-Damaged Data Centers Stay Down
Amazon has suspended billing for cloud customers across its Middle East regions as the AWS Middle East data center recovery effort stretches well beyond initial expectations, with a return to normal operations now months away.
The AWS status dashboard posted an April 30 update confirming 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 remain unable to fully support customer workloads. As of the week of April 30, 37 services in the UAE alone were listed as disrupted, with several affected since early March.
The Damage That Started It All
The crisis traces back to March 1, when Iranian drone strikes hit Amazon data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. Amazon confirmed on its service health page that the attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some cases triggered fire suppression systems that led to water damage. Services knocked offline included EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, Kinesis, CloudWatch, and RDS, among others.
In an unprecedented move, Amazon waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 across both affected regions, applied automatically to customer accounts. Now, with billing suspended again during the ongoing repair phase, the AWS Middle East data center recovery timeline could mean customers go nearly half a year with disrupted services before anything resembles normalcy. Khaleej Times reports Amazon described the recovery as “prolonged.” For businesses relying on Gulf cloud infrastructure, the uncertainty is far from over.
