Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers
Summary
AWS is facing extended service disruptions in the Middle East following drone strikes on data centers in the UAE and Bahrain. The damage to the infrastructure has rendered the affected regions unable to support customer applications, with full restoration expected to take several months.
Key Points
- Affected AWS regions include
ME-CENTRAL-1(UAE) andME-SOUTH-1(Bahrain). - The infrastructure is currently unable to support customer applications due to physical damage.
- AWS has suspended billing operations in the affected regions during the repair period.
- Usage-related charges for March 2026 were waived, at an estimated cost of $150 million.
- Full recovery of normal operations is projected to take several months.
Technical Details
The outage is characterized by the physical compromise of the ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 regions, preventing the hosting of active workloads. AWS recommends that developers migrate all active resources to alternative, functional cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any resources that have become inaccessible. Effective mitigation of this disruption requires a pre-configured disaster recovery strategy, as demonstrated by the ability of services like Careem to restore operations through overnight migrations to different regional clusters.
Impact / Why It Matters
Developers must implement multi-region architectures and robust, off-site backup protocols to ensure application availability during regional infrastructure failures.