AWS Data Center in UAE Goes Dark After Being Hit by “Objects”
An Amazon Web Services data center in the United Arab Emirates suffered a multi-hour outage on Sunday after unidentified “objects” struck the facility and triggered a fire. The incident occurred around 4:30 a.m. local time and affected the availability zone mec1-az2 in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region. The fire department cut power to combat the flames, resulting in significant disruptions to cloud services. Given the simultaneous Iranian retaliatory attacks on the Gulf states, suspicion arises that the impacting objects may have been missiles or drones. Amazon has not confirmed anything on its part.
The technical impact extended across numerous AWS services. EC2 instances, database instances, and EBS volumes in the affected zone became unreachable. Network APIs in particular showed massive problems: AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, and DescribeNetworkInterfaces recorded high error rates. The cloud provider immediately initiated measures to redirect traffic to unaffected availability zones. Customers were advised to retry failed API requests or switch to alternative zones or other AWS regions.
Regional Conflict as Possible Background
The timing of the incident coincides with a dramatic escalation in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates is experiencing Iranian retaliatory strikes after the United States and Israel carried out attacks on Iran on Saturday. During these operations, high-ranking representatives of the Islamic Republic were killed, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the country for 37 years. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks on targets throughout the Gulf region, striking airports, ports, and residential areas. The Arab Gulf states—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE—repelled the attacks but did not respond with their own counterstrikes.
Amazon Web Services has not commented on whether there is a connection between the data center incident and the regional attacks. The company focused its communications on technical aspects and recovery measures. The affected availability zone consists of one or more connected physical data centers with redundant power supply and networking. Customers who had operated their applications redundantly across multiple zones were largely spared from the outage.
Gradual Service Recovery
Over the course of the day, AWS made progress in resolving the issues. By afternoon, initial signs of recovery appeared in various EC2 APIs, particularly in the Describe functions and AllocateAddress. The AssociateAddress API initially continued to cause difficulties until around 6 p.m. when a significant improvement occurred. The company also implemented a change that enabled customers to detach elastic IP addresses from affected resources and reassign them to resources in functioning zones. The other availability zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region continued to operate normally throughout the incident.
Full restoration of power and connectivity to the affected zone remains pending. AWS has repeatedly emphasized that reactivation would take several hours and must be carried out safely. Numerous services remain impaired, and no specific timeline for complete resolution was provided. The situation highlights the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in conflict regions and underscores the importance of geographically distributed redundancy for cloud-based services.
