I received an email / billing notification from AWS this week that may be the most diplomatically crafted communication in the history of cloud computing. Here it is, stripped of the usual boilerplate around it:

"AWS is waiving all usage-related charges in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region for March 2026. This waiver applies automatically to your account(s), and no action is required from you."

No explanation. No mention of the Iranian drone strikes that physically destroyed two of three availability zones in the region on March 1st. No reference to the 109 services that went down, nor the customers who spent weeks unable to terminate EC2 instances via the console because the control plane was as dead as the hardware underneath it. No acknowledgment that an entire month of cloud infrastructure effectively ceased to exist. Not even a link to their remarkably short (presumably because it wasn't insulting the Financial Times' reporting) corporate blog post explaining that you probably shouldn't expect that region to be working reliably again any time soon.

Just: we're waiving the charges. You're welcome. Move along.

I want to be clear: I have no problem with this. It's a tough situation, and it's not AWS' fault, given that there is not yet an Amazon standing military force.

But here's the part that caught my attention. The email continues: "You will not see any March 2026 usage for the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region in your Cost and Usage Report or Cost Explorer once processing is complete."

They're not just waiving customer charges for a month; they're erasing the billing and inventory data! //

For most organizations, the AWS bill isn't just an invoice. It's the canonical record of what infrastructure exists, where it's running, and how long it's been there. The Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is the closest thing many companies have to a single source of truth that accurately describes their cloud footprint.