Amazon Web Services has urged customers to move workloads from affected Middle East cloud regions after reporting conflict-related damage to data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The company said recovery would be prolonged.
AWS was reported to have told customers in an April 30 update that normal operations in both regions could take several more months to restore and that relevant billing operations were suspended. That specific timetable and continuing billing suspension have not been independently confirmed.
The affected regions are ME-CENTRAL-1 in the UAE and ME-SOUTH-1 in Bahrain.
Physical damage disrupted cloud services
In March, Amazon said two facilities in the UAE had sustained direct drone strikes, while a strike near a Bahrain facility had damaged infrastructure there. The company said the strikes caused structural damage and interrupted power delivery. Fire suppression activities caused additional water damage in some cases.
Amazon said the disruption affected services including EC2 compute, S3 cloud storage and the DynamoDB database service.
A reported internal document described 14 EC2 server racks and five other production racks being knocked offline at one facility. It also described flooding and cooling equipment failures. Those facility-level details have not been independently confirmed.
Migration guidance and March charge waivers
Amazon said it was helping affected customers migrate to other AWS regions and that many were already operating applications elsewhere. It asked customers with workloads in the affected regions to continue migrating. The company also said it was working with local authorities and prioritizing personnel safety during recovery.
Careem’s Mudassir Sheikha described an overnight recovery effort following an AWS UAE outage. He said Rides and Hala services had been restored, along with Careem Pay onboarding affected through underlying providers. He also said teams had completed a cross-regional infrastructure migration.
In a customer notice, AWS said it was automatically waiving all usage-related charges in ME-CENTRAL-1 for March 2026. A March waiver was also reported for Bahrain, although a Bahrain-specific company notice has not been independently confirmed.
