Middle East AWS Outage
A severe infrastructure incident in the Middle East has triggered a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, disrupting critical cloud operations across the region.
The event, which aggressively impacted the ME-CENTRAL-1 (United Arab Emirates) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) regions, left countless organizations unable to access essential compute, networking, and storage resources.
The primary disruption originated in the UAE region within a single Availability Zone, identified as mec1-az2.
At approximately 4:30 AM PST on March 1, external objects struck the data center. This physical impact created sparks and ignited a structural fire.
To safely manage the emergency, local fire departments completely shut off primary power and backup generators to the facility.
This abrupt loss of electricity instantly brought down Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and active databases confined to the affected zone.
This localized power loss created a massive ripple effect across the AWS ecosystem.
Amazon EC2 suffered a severe disruption, while critical database tools like Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB reported heavily degraded performance, as reported by AWS.
In the ME-CENTRAL-1 region, over 38 distinct cloud services were impacted, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
Although AWS successfully resolved issues for 32 services like Amazon S3 and CloudWatch core networking APIs experienced prolonged failures.
Later that evening, a secondary wave of API connectivity issues struck the ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) region. This secondary event degraded RDS and impacted 46 additional services, including AWS CloudFormation and AWS WAF.
| Time (PST) | Region | Status and Event Description |
|---|---|---|
| 04:30 AM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | Facility struck by objects; fire breaks out and power is cut. |
| 06:09 AM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | AWS confirms localized power loss and isolates mec1-az2. |
| 09:41 AM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | Details of the fire released; power restoration significantly delayed. |
| 12:14 PM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | AWS deploys changes to fix failing EC2 networking APIs. |
| 06:01 PM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | Recovery of AssociateAddress API; facility power remains offline. |
| 09:56 PM | ME-SOUTH-1 | Increased API error rates detected in Bahrain (mes1-az2). |
AWS engineers rapidly routed traffic away from the compromised zone to stabilize the broader network.
However, services tied directly to the offline servers faced extended recovery times.
AWS advised administrators to bypass failing APIs, deploy alternate Availability Zones, and explicitly pass instance IDs when executing network queries.
The incident serves as a critical reminder of the importance of multi-AZ redundancy; clients utilising cross-zone architecture remained largely unaffected by the hardware failure.
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