A severe infrastructure failure hit Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Middle East, causing widespread outages for EC2 instances, networking, and storage services.
The incident struck the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) regions starting March 1, 2026, halting operations for many organizations reliant on these cloud resources.
Physical Damage Ignites Data Center Crisis
The outage began around 4:30 AM PST in ME-CENTRAL-1’s mec1-az2 Availability Zone. External objects struck the UAE data center, sparking a fire that forced local fire departments to cut primary power and backup generators.
This sudden blackout downed Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and databases in the zone.
The failure rippled across services. In ME-CENTRAL-1, 38 services like AWS Lambda, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) saw major disruptions.
As reported by AWS, Amazon RDS and DynamoDB experienced heavy degradation. While AWS restored 32 services, including S3 and CloudWatch, core EC2 networking APIs failed for hours.
Later, at 9:56 PM PST, ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain, mes1-az2) faced API errors, hitting 46 services such as RDS, CloudFormation, and Web Application Firewall (WAF).
| Time (PST) | Region | Status and Event Description |
|---|---|---|
| 04:30 AM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | Facility struck by objects; fire breaks out, power cut. |
| 06:09 AM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | AWS confirms power loss, isolates mec1-az2. |
| 09:41 AM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | Fire details released; power restoration delayed. |
| 12:14 PM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | Fixes deployed for failing EC2 networking APIs. |
| 06:01 PM | ME-CENTRAL-1 | AssociateAddress API recovers; power still offline. |
| 09:56 PM | ME-SOUTH-1 | API error rates rise in Bahrain (mes1-az2). |
AWS engineers rerouted traffic from the affected zone to stabilize services. They urged users to avoid failing APIs, shift to other Availability Zones, and include instance IDs in network calls. Recovery took longer for zone-tied resources.
This event highlights cloud infrastructure risks beyond cyber threats, like physical attacks or failures. Multi-AZ setups proved vital; cross-zone users avoided most impacts.
Experts recommend redundancy, regular failover tests, and diverse regions to counter such disruptions.
AWS’s status page confirmed resolutions by March 2, but it underscores the need for robust disaster recovery in high-stakes environments.
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