Updated as of late Monday: Amazon confirms these outages were the result of 2 direct hit drone strikes and 1 near miss drone strike. Update as of early Wednesday, outages are ongoing and the severity level of the incident is still at the maximum “Disrupted.”
AWS says “objects” struck a data center in its UAE region (ME-CENTRAL-1), throwing sparks and starting a fire. The fire department shut off power to the building and its generators while they worked the scene, and AWS says it was still waiting for permission to turn power back on. Given that the power outage has lasted for hours, we expect this wasn’t a minor dusting of debris.
Translation: the site that was struck is not yet operational as we go to press, and bringing it back online is not just flipping a switch after a fire.
From the AWS Service Health status page:
At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, 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.
A Separate Power Problem Suggests Wider Damage in the Region
Separately, AWS reports a “localized power issue” affecting a different availability zone in the same UAE region, with knock-on problems that made it hard or impossible to launch new capacity and caused major slowdowns and errors across multiple services.
AWS is careful with wording, but taken together, “objects” hitting a data center plus other power failures nearby looks less like random bad luck and more like a region under serious strain, almost certainly tied to the ongoing war between the USA, Iran, Israel, and apparently now the UAE.
Why It Matters
Cloud infrastructure like this sits under a lot of modern life, and at its heart, cloud infrastructure is physical infrastructure. If the physical server gets hit with “objects” and bursts into flames, the modern technology that fuels everyday life breaks down.
AWS labeled this disruption as severe enough to recommend customers fail over to another region if they can.
We are a cars and comedy joint, not a cloud industry newsletter, but we were surprised how little tech-side coverage we saw early on, so this coverage landed in our lap. Sadly, if the war continues, expect more headlines like this.
Credit to Emily Gorcenski on Bluesky, who was the first person I saw mention the AWS bulletin.
