AWS Middle East outage spread after “objects” struck a data center in the UAE on March 1, triggering sparks and a fire, according to AWS service updates. Responders shut off power to the facility and its generators while the fire was addressed, creating a recovery path that depended on restoring safe power and cooling conditions.
By March 1, AWS said two availability zones in its UAE region were significantly impacted, with customers seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress. AWS also reported significant error rates and elevated latency across major services, with multiple offerings disrupted or degraded. The AWS Management Console and command line interface were also disrupted in the region during the incident.
On March 2, AWS reported localized power and connectivity issues affecting services in the UAE, along with separate issues impacting an availability zone in Bahrain. AWS said local authorities eventually cut power to parts of the affected facility, contributing to the disruption and estimated recovery would take at least a day due to repairs, restoration of cooling and power systems, coordination with authorities and safety assessments.
- AWS advised shifting workloads to alternate regions or failing over where architectures allow.
- A person with direct knowledge said financial institutions using AWS were affected and a UAE bank cited a region-wide IT disruption during app unavailability.
