AWS suspended billing for ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 after Iranian drone strikes and says full recovery will take several more months.
Key Takeaways
Iranian drone strikes in late February hit three AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain; AWS waived March 2026 charges at an estimated $150M cost.
ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 remain unable to support customer applications; billing suspension continues until normal operations resume.
AWS strongly recommends migrating to other regions and restoring from remote backups; Careem completed an overnight cross-region migration successfully.
Total outage duration could approach six months from strike to full recovery, making this one of the longest cloud region outages on record.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged that data centers are high-value, low-casualty targets: a handful of cheap drones or a single transformer hit can take a region offline for weeks.
Skepticism surrounds the reported damage scope – only 19 server racks affected is hard to reconcile with a half-year repair timeline, suggesting structural or power infrastructure damage far beyond the racks themselves.
The billing waiver drew cynicism: suspending charges when services are completely down is the contractual floor, not generosity.
Notable Comments
@nerdsniper: Notes Shahed-class drones typically cause far more physical destruction than 19 racks implies.
@readams: “It must be more than a roof repair and 19 racks” – points to power or structural damage as the real bottleneck.
@neuroelectron: Former AWS employee notes wartime targeting was never part of the resilience threat model discussed internally.
