A major service disruption has impacted the UAE cloud region of Amazon Web Services after a fire broke out at one of its data centres. The incident caused outages and performance issues across several services, affecting businesses and users across the Gulf region.
The outage occurred in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region after unidentified objects struck a data centre, causing sparks and a fire. The incident impacted the mec1-az2 availability zone. Emergency crews shut off power to contain the fire, which also affected generators and connectivity systems.
The event reportedly began around 4:30 p.m. Dubai time on Sunday, March 1. While other availability zones in the UAE continued operating, customers reported delays, service errors and connectivity problems.
AWS immediately started rerouting traffic to unaffected availability zones and advised customers to use alternate zones or other regions where possible. However, systems closely linked to mec1-az2 may continue to face interruptions until recovery is complete.
The disruption impacted several core AWS services, including EC2, Amazon S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, CloudTrail, Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Amazon Elastic File System, Amazon Elastic Container Registry and the AWS Management Console.
In addition, 25 services experienced degraded performance. These include AWS Application Migration Service, AWS Config, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS IoT Core, AWS Key Management Service, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Step Functions, AWS Transit Gateway, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Cognito, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EMR Serverless, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Simple Email Service, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Simple Workflow Service and others.
Customers reported several technical issues during the outage. These included EC2 API errors, instance launch failures, inability to launch new instances, high S3 data ingest and egress failures, elevated S3 latency, DynamoDB error spikes, networking API failures such as AllocateAddress and AssociateAddress errors, Elastic IP disassociation issues and failures in APIs like DescribeRouteTable and DescribeNetworkInterfaces. Access to the AWS Management Console and AWS CLI was also disrupted due to issues in mec1-az2 and mec1-az3.
The affected zones include mec1-az2 as the primary impacted zone, mec1-az3 which was later affected and mec1-az1 which remained operational but experienced API and launch errors. Bahrain also reported connectivity and power-related problems.
AWS described the situation as a localized power and connectivity issue. Engineers are restoring power, checking connectivity and assessing data health. Recovery could take several hours and may extend into the next day as safety inspections and facility repairs continue.
The outage also affected desktop and mobile users because many websites and applications run on AWS infrastructure. Users experienced login failures, slow loading times and service interruptions.
AWS currently operates 123 availability zones across 39 global regions. Most global operations remained unaffected, but the UAE outage highlights the importance of regional redundancy and disaster recovery planning.
The disruption occurred during a period of missile and drone threats reported in the UAE amid wider regional tensions involving Iran, Israel and the United States. UAE authorities reported interceptions over the weekend, although AWS has not confirmed any direct link between these events and the data centre fire.
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