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AWS Suspends Billing in UAE and Bahrain Two Months After War Damaged Both Data Centers

Two months after Iranian drone strikes physically destroyed infrastructure at three AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, Amazon confirmed April 30 that full recovery will take several more months. The company has suspended billing operations in both affected cloud regions — ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) — and is advising customers to migrate accessible workloads and restore inaccessible ones from remote backups.

As of the week of April 30, 37 AWS services in the UAE remain listed as disrupted on Amazon’s status dashboard, with several showing continuous outages since March 1.

What Happened on March 1-2

Iran fired drone and missile barrages at Gulf states in early March in response to US and Israeli military action. Two AWS facilities in the UAE — designated DXB62 and DXB61 — were directly struck. A third facility in Bahrain sustained damage from a strike in close proximity.

The structural damage covered three categories: direct impact to hardware, disrupted power delivery, and water damage from fire suppression activities. Amazon staff were evacuated from DXB62, which sustained over an inch of standing water and had more than a dozen EC2 rack clusters knocked offline. Two of three availability zones in ME-CENTRAL-1 were rendered non-responsive.

EC2 compute, S3 cloud storage, and DynamoDB were among the disrupted services. Financial institutions using AWS in the region experienced connectivity issues. Amazon’s e-commerce operations in Abu Dhabi halted deliveries during the peak disruption period.

Billing Waiver and Data Erasure

Amazon has waived all usage-related charges in ME-CENTRAL-1 for March 2026. According to customer communications, Amazon is also removing all March 2026 usage data from Cost and Usage Reports and Cost Explorer once processing completes.

This means the billing record — which serves as the canonical infrastructure inventory for most enterprise cloud users — will show a clean, empty month for UAE workloads. Compliance teams, auditors, and FinOps functions that rely on the Cost and Usage Report as a source of truth for cloud footprint will see no record of resources that were, in many cases, running but inaccessible to their operators.

For customers who were billed for resources they could not terminate because the API control plane was offline, the waiver resolves the immediate financial issue. The data erasure raises a separate question about audit continuity.

The Broader Stakes for Cloud in the Region

AWS launched its Bahrain region in 2019 as the first cloud infrastructure in the Middle East. The UAE region followed. Both were positioned as foundational to the region’s AI ambitions — Microsoft, Google, and others have made multi-billion dollar commitments to UAE AI infrastructure.

The March strikes mark the first time a major US technology company’s data centers have been physically damaged in a military action. Amazon’s total 2026 capital expenditure plan is $200 billion, with the bulk going toward new data center construction globally.

The UAE AI hub ambitions have not been officially revised. Amazon has not disclosed a timeline for restoring the affected regions beyond “several months.” Customers with active workloads in either region are recommended to treat them as unavailable for planning purposes.