Don’t expect Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Middle East data centers to come back online anytime soon. That’s the message from the company’s health dashboard for clients. AWS said on Monday that it would be “at least a day” before it could restore power and connectivity, but it has since stopped giving updates on timeline.

Where things stood as of late last night: The recovery is grinding forward, but its services in the region are far from operational. AWS said overnight that its core S3 storage service was showing improvement for new data, but still can’t reliably pull information that clients stored before the strikes — so anything you had on their services before Sunday is still inaccessible.

Most of its other regional services are impaired: A key database service is also down, and the combination of that and the S3 outage is cascading across other AWS services that companies big and small have traditionally relied on to run websites, apps, and other core business services.

WHY IT MATTERS- A who’s who of business relies on AWS. Case in point: ADCB’s website says this morning that its app and contact center are still down. Other services that have been hit by disruptions are coming back to life as they move to other AWS cloud facilities in Europe, the US, and Asia. Careem, Talabat, Alaan, trading app Sarwa, and Hubpay were all hit with service outages or degraded performance, but are now back up and running. Our website, EnterpriseAM.com, is back online this morning after we moved to a new AWS jurisdiction and manually restored missing data from our local systems.

We now know more about what happened: Two AWS data centers in the UAE were hit by drone strikes and a third facility in Bahrain was also damaged by a drone hit. Amazon spent the first 24 hours of the outage saying only that “objects” had caused “sparks and fire.” The strikes caused structural damage, knocked out power, and triggered fire suppression systems that caused water damage.

AWS is telling customers in the Middle East to get out of Dodge, saying it “strongly recommends” that clients move to US, European, and Asia Pacific regions. The company is also signaling that it doesn’t want to talk much about the issue, saying that from now on it’s going to be communicating “directly with affected customers” instead of posting public updates.

REMEMBER- As we wrote earlier this week, the episode is a stress test for the Gulf’s AI pitch as it collides with wartime reality. Analysts told us this week that in the compute era, data centers rank alongside pipelines as strategic infrastructure. Multi-regional deployment is no longer optional, Engagesoft’s Tareq Tahboub said, while Rimal’s Houssam Salem flagged the risks of hyperscale centralization. AWS itself now warns the broader operating environment “remains unpredictable.”

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