Middle East Conflict: AWS Data Centre Caught in Crossfire
As hostility between the US and Iran continues to escalate, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed one of its facilities has been caught in the crossfire.
AWS said unidentified objects had struck an AWS data centre in UAE, setting the facility ablaze.
The incident, which took place on Sunday (1 March), is speculated to be a result of Iranian strikes on the UAE and other Gulf Arab states, as it responds to the US-Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The AWS Health dashboard reads: “At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire.
“The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely.
“It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally.
“Customers who were running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event. EC2 Instance launches will continue to be impaired in the impacted AZ. We recommend that customers continue to retry any failed API requests.”
Some financial institutions and banks in the UAE reported online banking platform disruptions, demonstrating that the impact is not just internal to AWS but rippled across end users.
AWS services down
Following the fire, Amazon Web Services continues to address a localised power issue affecting multiple Availability Zones in its ME-CENTRAL-1 region, specifically mec1-az2 and mec1-az3.
Availability Zones (AZs) are physically separate data centres within a region, designed to provide high reliability and redundancy.
MEC1‑AZ2, in particular, is one of the primary zones serving the UAE and surrounding Middle Eastern countries, hosting a range of cloud infrastructure including compute, storage and database resources for local businesses and multinational clients operating in the region.
The affected zones are currently experiencing increased EC2 API errors and failed instance launches, meaning customers are unable to create new virtual servers or reliably manage existing ones in those locations.
In addition, key services such as Amazon DynamoDB, a cloud database, and Amazon S3, a cloud storage service, are showing significant delays and errors.
Existing resources in mec1-az1 remain operational, but AWS warns that full recovery of the impacted zones will take several hours. The company recommends that customers back up critical data and where possible, fail over their workloads to another AWS region to minimise disruption.
This incident highlights the importance of multi-region redundancy and disaster recovery planning, particularly as geopolitical tensions in the Middle East put critical infrastructure at risk.
Multi-cloud strategy in focus amid disruptions
While Amazon S3 is designed to withstand the loss of a single availability zone, the simultaneous impairment of mec1-az2 and mec1-az3 has caused elevated error rates for data storage and retrieval.
Customers are experiencing difficulties with both ingesting and extracting S3 data and AWS strongly advises directing workloads to an alternate region where possible.
AWS noted that it was conducting a careful assessment of data health in the affected zones and will repair storage if required before full restoration.
In addition, the AWS management console and command line interface (CLI) are also affected, limiting the ability of customers to manage resources across the impacted zones.
AWS engineers are continuing their efforts to restore all services safely, prioritising both connectivity and data integrity. The development emphasises the critical need for businesses to implement multi-region cloud strategies and maintain contingency plans to reduce the impact of regional disruptions in geopolitically-sensitive areas.
