Amazon Web Services reported a major outage after one of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates was hit by unidentified objects. The incident occurred around 6:00 pm IST on March 1 and affected the mec1-az2 availability zone in AWS’s Middle East (ME-CENTRAL-1) region. The impact caused sparks and started a fire inside the building, leading emergency teams to shut off both the main electricity supply and backup generators. Customers using cloud services like computing, storage, and managed databases experienced errors and temporary outages. The disruption comes at a time of rising US/Israel-Iran tensions across the Gulf, although AWS has not confirmed whether the incident is directly connected to the wider conflict.
According to AWS, the strike produced visible sparks and ignited a fire inside the facility, prompting local emergency responders to take swift action. As all power sources were disabled, the affected availability zone was rendered offline. Clients experienced a range of issues, including failed API requests, slow response times, and, in some cases, complete service unavailability. Many workloads that relied on the impacted zone’s compute instances, storage buckets, and managed database clusters were forced into degraded states. AWS advised customers to migrate critical workloads to other availability zones or regions as an interim measure, noting that full restoration could take several hours as technicians worked to safely re-establish power and connectivity.
“When the mec1-az2 AZ was powered off at approximately 4:00 AM PST on Sunday, March 1, S3 continued to operate normally. As the second AZ became impaired, S3 error rates increased. With two Availability Zones significantly impacted, customers are seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress. We strongly advise customers to update their applications to ingest S3 data to an alternate AWS Region. As soon as practically possible, we will begin the restoration of our two Availability Zones, which will include a careful assessment of data health and any repair of storage if necessary,” the firm informed in its latest service status update (last updated on March 2 at 2:53 AM PST).
What makes this outage especially significant is its timing amid escalating tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran. Over recent days, the Gulf region has witnessed a clear increase in military engagements and retaliatory strikes following a series of coordinated US and Israeli operations targeting Iranian positions. Iran has responded with ballistic missile and drone barrages against multiple Gulf countries, including claims of strikes near UAE territory. These exchanges have already damaged civil infrastructure, including airports, seaports and residential areas.
However, AWS has not confirmed a direct link between the objects that hit the data center and any military actions or geopolitical attacks connected to the US/Israel-Iran conflict, and company officials have been careful to describe the cause only in general terms. It seems that as ongoing geopolitical conflicts spread into cyberspace and critical infrastructure, commercial cloud facilities could increasingly become direct targets or unintended casualties of wider military tensions.
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