AWS UAE data center hit by fire after strike

CRN reports that an Amazon Web Services data center in the United Arab Emirates was struck by unidentified objects on March 1, igniting a fire that disrupted services across the region. According to AWS's status dashboard, the incident affected Availability Zone mec1-az2, prompting firefighters to cut power to the facility and its generators while containing the blaze.

As of Monday morning, two UAE Availability Zones remained impaired, with core services including Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB experiencing elevated error rates and latency. Customers reported high failure rates for data ingest and egress. AWS has not disclosed what objects caused the damage, but urged customers to redirect S3 workloads to alternate regions.

The outage disrupted roughly 10 major services, including EC2 and Lambda, while dozens more were degraded or impacted. Management Console and CLI access were also affected. AWS said some systems show "significant signs of recovery," though power restoration timelines remain unclear.