AWS has stopped billing customers in its Middle East cloud regions after Iranian drone strikes damaged data centers in the UAE and Bahrain amidst escalating tensions. The attacks, which occurred in March 2026 during a broader regional conflict, knocked out 14 EC2 server racks and damaged five more at one facility alone. AWS estimates it's eating $150 million by waiving March usage charges, and the company's April 30 status update says full restoration will take "several months." That puts the total disruption at close to six months.
The physical damage reads like a disaster movie. According to Jeremy Hsu at Ars Technica, who reviewed internal documents, fire suppression systems flooded parts of the data centers and cooling systems failed mechanically. AWS is now "strongly" recommending customers migrate to other regions and restore from remote backups. Some companies moved fast. Careem, a Dubai-based super app, pulled off an overnight migration to servers elsewhere.
AWS has no legal obligation to absorb these costs. Standard cloud contracts include Force Majeure clauses that exclude liability for "acts of war" or "armed conflict." Most insurance policies have war exclusions too. The billing suspension is a voluntary retention strategy, not a contractual requirement. The financial burden of downtime falls entirely on customers who didn't plan for their data center to literally get bombed.
This is one of the first documented cases of cloud infrastructure taking direct kinetic damage from military action. Pure Data Centre Group, a London-based developer, has already paused Middle East data center investments until the conflict ends. For anyone running critical services in unstable regions, the takeaway is blunt: multi-region failover architecture is the only backup that matters when physical infrastructure gets destroyed.