- Objects struck AWS UAE data centre March 1.
- Fire led to power shutdown in two zones.
- Separate outage reported in AWS Bahrain region.
- AWS said full recovery would take many hours.
Amazon Web Services suffered a significant disruption to its cloud infrastructure in the Middle East on Sunday and Monday after unidentified objects struck its UAE data centre at around 4:30 p.m. Dubai time on March 1, triggering sparks and a fire.
The UAE fire department cut power to the affected facility and its generators while extinguishing the blaze, leaving two availability zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region designated mec1-az1 and mec1-az2 without power. A separate connectivity and power issue simultaneously emerged in AWS's Bahrain region.
As of Monday morning, AWS said full recovery for both regions was "many hours away" and advised customers to redirect workloads to its services in other regions. EC2 instances, database instances, EBS volumes and key networking APIs including AllocateAddress, DescribeRouteTable and DescribeNetworkInterfaces were all affected in the impacted zones.
AWS Confirms Fire and Power Shutdown; Declines to Link Incident to Iranian Strikes
AWS confirmed the incident on its Health Dashboard, stating: "At around 4:30 a.m. PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire."
The company did not describe the nature of the objects. When Reuters asked directly whether the UAE incident was connected to Iranian missile and drone strikes on Gulf states that day retaliatory attacks following US and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28 AWS did not confirm or deny any connection.
The Iranian strikes hit airports, ports and residential areas across the UAE and wider Gulf region. In response, the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council held an emergency video meeting and said it would take "all necessary measures" to defend security and safeguard territories.
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Separately, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank said on Monday that technical issues were affecting some of its digital platforms and mobile app users. It was unclear whether the lender's outage was related to AWS.
Investors and cloud customers are watching closely whether Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud report similar disruptions, given that both maintain regional infrastructure in the Gulf. AWS is the world's largest cloud provider, controlling approximately 31 per cent of the global cloud infrastructure market.
Any extended outage of its Middle East nodes has direct consequences for banks, airlines, government services and media companies that rely on its UAE and Bahrain regions for operations across the Gulf, the Levant and South Asia.
