Amazon is facing months of repairs after drone strikes damaged its data centers, raising concerns about the resilience of its cloud infrastructure and potential service disruptions. Some companies were able to restore functionality quickly by shifting operations to other regions. However, not all organizations had the same level of redundancy, leaving some operations partially disrupted.
Amazon’s cloud division has been dealing with prolonged disruptions after drone strikes damaged multiple data centers in the Middle East, leaving some services offline for months. The affected facilities in the UAE and Bahrain are expected to take several more months to fully recover, extending the total outage period to nearly half a year.
The incident has impacted key Amazon Web Services cloud regions, with the company confirming that infrastructure in both locations suffered significant damage. Customers relying on these regions have been unable to access certain applications and data, according to Ars Technica.
According to updates from AWS, billing for affected customers has been temporarily suspended while repairs continue. The company had already waived usage charges for March 2026, with the financial impact estimated at around $150 million. Clients have been advised to migrate workloads to other regions and rely on backups to restore services where possible.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and were unable to support customer applications. The update also said that ‘relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations’ in a process that ‘is expected to take several months.’
AWS also strongly recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any ‘inaccessible resources.’
Also Read: Amazon Braces for Massive Layoffs as Automation Drive Accelerates
The scale of the disruption reflects the physical damage to critical infrastructure. Internal reports indicate that multiple server racks, including core EC2 systems used for virtual computing, were knocked offline. Additional complications came from water damage caused by fire suppression systems and failures in cooling equipment, both of which are essential for maintaining data center operations.
The war began on February 28, with US and Israeli attacks on Iran triggering retaliatory Iranian strikes across the region. It has since settled into an uneasy ceasefire period with dueling naval blockades of the Strait of Hormuz shipping choke point as a growing economic and energy crisis escalates globally.