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Cloud The Almighty Buck

Amazon Stuck With Months of Repairs After Drone Strikes On Data Centers (arstechnica.com) 191

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all. 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 are 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."

That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions -- ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 -- after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also "strongly" recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem—which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery -- were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.

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Amazon Stuck With Months of Repairs After Drone Strikes On Data Centers

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    You ready for this shit, AI?

    • Nah, AI hasn't been trained on 2026 data, so it can't be used. Like with a Tesla, a human has to be ready to take over decision making at any moment.
  • Why are the repairs necessary? What drone strikes?

    Did something happen recently to bring this about?

    • Why are the repairs necessary? What drone strikes?

      Persian Gulf

      • Does a geographical feature like the Persian Gulf have drones? Can it strike at datacenters?

        This stuff that's been going on since March is really incomprehensible to me.

        Is Mother Nature turning on Jeff Besos because of all that silicone in the tits of his trophy waifu?

        Might there be another, more relevant reason for the retaliatory strikes? Like a war of aggression, perhaps?

        • This stuff that's been going on since March is really incomprehensible to me.

          What do you mean? We've been told the war ended many weeks ago - so there can't be anything preventing Amazon from repairing those data centers now.

          Maybe it's lazy union tradespeople or something.

          • Yep, very likely so. Ban these already, I say.

          • Something odd is going on though. Trump seems to be obeying the 60 day war power time limit. Frankly I'm stunned. Although it might be as silly as "I suspended ops in Iran Friday, so on Monday when I start again it starts a new 60 day clock." But really I just am stunned trump didn't just break the law again. It is odd. Really odd.
            • My theory is obviously violating a law would make him an easy mark for Democratic impeachment and (bipartisan) conviction after the midterms.

              • Pretty sure they already have all the ammunition they would need to impeach him, it's not like there's a clock on it.
                • Agree, impeachment conviction by the R's. Makes me laugh. The prior times had plenty of good reasons to convict and I don't think even one R did. And you need 2/3rds. a very high bar. Even Paxton in TX didn't get convicted by his friends in the senate again 2/3rds. And he did everything from stealing gov money to cheating on his wife to financial crimes. Instead of crawling into a hole and disappearing he is running for US Senate, now in a runoff with Cornyn. I did read one strongly conservative republican
            • He wants to end it, he's just in various ways not able to.

              Calling a "ceasefire" without actually withdrawing is a fairly pain-free way for him (to feel like) he's stepping towards an end.

              An end, for him, means gas prices back to normal before the election. He sees the ceasefire as not antagonistic to that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      A very stable genius is shitting in the swimming pool known as Earth and his cult followers care more about keeping power than doing anything to help the country. They could rein him in at any time but are scared to anger his base. For fucks sake they walk around in shoes 5 sizes too big because dear leader bought them. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13... [cnn.com]

      Liters like fucking clown shoes.

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      it happened weeks ago but you're probably watching epstein media ... so a whole lot has happened that you don't know. but don't worry, if trump doesn't back off soon you will definitely know.

  • by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday May 01, 2026 @11:47PM (#66123542) Journal

    to Trump's campaign.

  • by shm ( 235766 ) on Friday May 01, 2026 @11:58PM (#66123560)

    Trump who obliterated Iran, or Amazon?

  • So wait... if I migrate my stuff to the ME datacenters, I won't have to pay? I'm aware that service may not be available or intermittent, and that resources may be lost permanently without warning... but if I'm designing for fault tolerant operations, this seems like a perfect proving ground, and not having to pay during the reconstruction period seems like a bonus...

  • It isn't good for business throwing your lot in with a man baby backed by a death cult obsessed with triggering Biblical end times, and an Internet army of full-time losers. Have fun filling your jets and delivery trucks. I doubt that free next day deliveries can scale when most of your fleet isn't electrified yet.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday May 02, 2026 @01:34AM (#66123684)
    Not to mention the tax cuts Trump is still a damn good deal for them. Fun fact next year a shitload of rural and suburban hospitals are going to be shutting down.

    That's because the Republicans didn't really have the votes to have ram those tax cuts through so they used a process called budget reconciliation that allows them to bypass Senate rules and pass legislation with a simple majority.

    But that process requires everything be budget neutral on paper and no matter how crazy they did the math they couldn't make that work without cutting Medicare and Medicaid.

    Now from Medicare they mostly are using dirty little tricks to cut around the periphery but from Medicaid they've instituted work requirements that are basically impossible for the kind of person who is living on Medicaid to meet so that they just get kicked off. There's also a shitload of other dirty little cuts to the program.

    And for everyone thinking so what I'm not a dirty filthy, socialist on government healthcare why would I care? Your hospital relies on the money from Medicare and Medicaid to stay open and keep the private equity vultures fed.

    Now if you win one of those major cities, the kind that Fox News will tell you is currently on fire because of antifa stormtroopers, then your hospital has enough other business to stay open.

    But if you're in the burbs or the sticks you're in trouble. Now the rural folks don't have a lot of options here. Rural people are either too stupid to understand they're being screwed or they know they're being screwed but they can't do anything about it because there's a guy who basically owns all the property in their county and if they want a job or a place to live they go through him. Turns out rural people aren't actually very self-sufficient, decades and decades of poverty will do that to a man..

    But still they're expecting it. It's the people in the suburbs that are going to be shocked when their hospitals start closing. It turns out that having a huge amount of sparsely populated land is nice as far as property values and comfort but not so good for your tax base. So there isn't actually enough of a base in most suburbs to sustain their services and they actually rely heavily on subsidies from the inner cities and the federal government.

    Well we just took down that chesterton's fence and y'all going to find out what it's like for your hospital is to start cutting services and closing. There is a fund to try and counteract some of it but it's a tiny fraction of what's needed and is mostly going to get sucked up by corrupt political insiders in the Republican party.

    Anyway if you're in a suburb or the sticks I highly recommend you don't get sick for at least next 10 years. It'll take that long for the Democrats to have a prayer in hell and doing some of this damage.
  • by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Saturday May 02, 2026 @02:57AM (#66123764)

    This actually is quite just.

    Bezos has supported Trump in many ways so it is just what he supported...

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      Bezos went from "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Democracy is Overrated".

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Bezos has supported Trump in many ways so it is just what he supported...

      Yep, exactly.

      Everyone says "But I didn't vote for this!" If you voted for Trump, yes you did. Sure you may have liked some policies, enough so to disregard his other policies, but you voted for the entire package. You don't get to pick and choose, you just choose which one has more pros than cons for you. And hope none of those cons bites you.

      Bezos voted for a warmonger who ended up getting his data centers destroyed. He voted for it.

  • The perils of centralized data, as in a couple of drones can take out an all your data in the “cloud” :o
  • Amazon can afford to build seriously hardened data centers only a large aerial bomb could penetrate.

    There is every reason to dig in when you live in a combat zone. (Why the USAF didn't build serious HAS at PSAB when it ate Scuds on the reg during Desert Storm is a mystery, but hubris doesn't make for wise decisions.)

    Bunkers are really quite comfy in hot climates thanks to high thermal mass. Barriers raise the bar to successful attacks. See the old U-boat pens on the Channel coast for specs ample to protect

  • Sounds like a global location that likely may justify the expense of building these datacenter locations underground.

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