AWS Middle East Services Disrupted
A series of drone strikes on Amazon Web Services data center facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain triggered one of the most severe cloud outages in AWS history, knocking out or degrading more than 109 services across the ME-CENTRAL-1 region beginning March 1, 2026, and leaving thousands of enterprise customers scrambling to migrate workloads for days.
The incident began at approximately 4:30 AM PST on March 1, when one of AWS’s Availability Zones in the UAE, mec1-az2, was struck by what the company initially described as “objects,” causing “sparks and fire” inside the data center.
Local fire departments shut off power to the facility and its generators while containing the blaze. AWS initially framed the event as a “localized power issue” while publicly downplaying the cause.
By March 2 at 4:19 PM PST, AWS confirmed the broader truth: two UAE facilities in ME-CENTRAL-1 had been directly struck by drone attacks, while a third facility in the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1) was damaged when a drone struck in close proximity. AWS attributed the strikes to the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East”.
The attacks caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery, and in some locations triggered fire suppression systems that caused additional water damage.
According to Amazon status updates, a second availability Zone, mec1-az3, fell offline hours after the initial strike on mec1-az2, leaving only mec1-az1 partially operational. With two of three AZs simultaneously impaired, Amazon S3’s built-in regional redundancy, designed to tolerate the complete loss of a single AZ, was overwhelmed, resulting in high failure rates for both data ingest and egress.
The event cascaded rapidly across AWS’s service stack. At peak disruption, the outage touched 109 services across the ME-CENTRAL-1 region, 25 fully disrupted, 34 degraded, and 50 impacted. Core foundational services bore the brunt first:
| Service | Status | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | Disrupted | High PUT/GET/LIST failure rates |
| Amazon DynamoDB | Disrupted | Elevated error rates, write/read failures |
| Amazon EC2 | Disrupted | Instance launches throttled region-wide |
| AWS Lambda | Disrupted | Dependent on S3/DynamoDB recovery |
| Amazon Kinesis | Disrupted | Cascaded from foundational service failure |
| Amazon CloudWatch | Disrupted | Monitoring degraded |
| Amazon RDS | Disrupted | Database availability impaired |
| AWS Management Console | Disrupted | Partial operational; page errors persisted |
Beyond cloud infrastructure, the outage rippled into consumer-facing applications across the UAE. Ride-hailing and delivery platform Careem, and payment services Alaan and Hubpay all reported disruptions directly tied to AWS infrastructure failure, underscoring how deeply regional economies rely on hyperscale cloud providers.
AWS pursued parallel recovery tracks, physical restoration of damaged facilities alongside software-based mitigations designed to restore partial service availability ahead of full infrastructure repair
For Amazon S3, the company deployed updates enabling the service to operate within degraded infrastructure constraints. For DynamoDB, teams worked to remediate impaired tables to restore read/write availability for downstream services.
By March 3 at 8:14 AM PST, AWS reported continued improvement in S3 PUT and LIST operations, with newly written objects retrievable — though GET operations for pre-existing data remained dependent on physical infrastructure restoration. EC2 instance launches remained throttled. DynamoDB error rates stayed elevated.
AWS issued a strong advisory across all update cycles, urging affected customers to immediately enact disaster recovery plans, restore from remote backups in other regions, and redirect application traffic away from ME-CENTRAL-1. Recommended alternate regions include AWS deployments in the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific based on latency and data residency requirements.
The incident has renewed urgent industry discussions around cloud infrastructure resilience in conflict zones, the risks of geographic concentration, and the need for multi-region active-active architectures, particularly for enterprises operating in geopolitically volatile environments.
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