- Service disruption hit Amazon Web Services after a fire at a data center in the United Arab Emirates
- The incident occurred in Dubai following reports of an object strike that triggered sparks and fire
- AWS confirmed the outage and implemented measures to reroute traffic while working to restore power and connectivity
A service disruption hit Amazon Web Services after a fire incident at a data center in the United Arab Emirates.
The cloud computing arm of Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos, confirmed the outage following reports that an unidentified object struck one of its facilities.
The incident reportedly triggered a fire at approximately 4:30 p.m. local time in Dubai, according to initial reports.
AWS stated that emergency responders shut down both utility power and backup generators as firefighters worked to contain the blaze.
In updates posted on its Health Dashboard, AWS acknowledged the disruption, noting: “One of our Availability Zones was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire,” the company said.
Availability Zones are regional clusters of data centres designed to enhance redundancy and reliability.
Authorities have not confirmed whether the fire was linked to ongoing regional tensions.
However, the incident occurred on the same day that projectiles were reported to have struck parts of the UAE amid broader hostilities following military exchanges involving Iran.
AWS disclosed that the outage affected its ME-CENTRAL-1 region, disrupting cloud services from around 11:30 GMT.
The downtime led to increased error rates across multiple platforms, with users reporting difficulties launching EC2 instances, accessing networking APIs, and utilizing DynamoDB and S3 services. Latency levels also rose significantly.
At one point, AWS confirmed that launching new instances in the affected availability zone was not possible, though existing instances remained operational in mec1-az1. Other services, including DynamoDB and S3, experienced elevated error rates and performance delays.
“We are actively working to restore power and connectivity, at which time we will begin to work to recover affected resources.
As of this time, we expect recovery is multiple hours away. For customers that can, we recommend failing away to another AWS Region at this time. We will provide an update by 12:00 AM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
AWS later implemented mitigation measures, including restoring select networking functions and enabling customers to reassign Elastic IP addresses away from affected systems. Despite these efforts, the company warned that full recovery would require several hours once power and connectivity were safely restored.
The outage comes amid broader security concerns in the Middle East, where missile and drone attacks have targeted military installations and infrastructure in several countries, including the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
AWS emphasized that its global operations remain largely intact, noting that the affected data center was limited to a single availability zone.
The company operates 123 availability zones across 39 regions worldwide and confirmed that traffic was being rerouted to maintain service continuity.