AWS Middle East Outage: Iranian Missile Strikes Spark Fire in Dubai Data Centers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services are experiencing a significant outage in parts of the Middle East after "objects" struck data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), causing "sparks and fire." Approximately 60 AWS services are down in the region, impacting web traffic in the UAE and Bahrain. The incident follows Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks on targets in and around Dubai on March 1, which were reportedly in retaliation for US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Customers began reporting outages tied to the mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 clusters in AWS's ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. Amazon has not officially confirmed the outage was caused by an Iranian attack, directing inquiries to its online health dashboard. According to the dashboard, at around 4:30 AM PST, the mec1-az2 Availability Zone was impacted by objects that struck the data center, leading to a fire. The fire department cut power to the facility and generators to extinguish the blaze. AWS is awaiting permission to restore power and expects the restoration of connectivity to take several hours. As of the morning of March 1 (9:22 AM ET), the damage had spread, and AWS stated recovery is expected to take at least a day. This timeline accounts for necessary repairs to facilities, cooling and power systems, coordination with local authorities, and safety assessments for operators.