Amazon has quietly stopped letting customers in Russia and Belarus open new cloud computing accounts.
The policy change for Amazon Web Services started over the weekend, according to an internal communication viewed by The New York Times, but was not publicly announced until Tuesday.
“Given the current events and the uncertainty and lack of credit available in Russia right now, we’re not accepting new Russian A.W.S. customers at this moment,” Drew Herdener, a top company spokesman, said in a statement.
A.W.S. does not have data centers or offices in Russia, and has said that its biggest customers there are multinational companies with local development teams.
A number of multinational corporations have scaled back their presence in Russia. McDonald’s said on Tuesday that it was temporarily closing its nearly 850 restaurants there, and oil companies were under pressure to stop buying Russian oil even before President Biden said he would ban energy imports from the country.
