AWS cloud outage hits UAE data center after object strike
Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a service disruption after an object struck one of its UAE data centers, triggering a fire Sunday evening Dubai time. The outage began at 1130 GMT and lasted until the end of the day, affecting multiple AWS services including EC2, DynamoDB, and S3 across the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. AWS confirmed the fire department shut down utility power and backup generators during firefighting efforts. While AWS stated other data centers were unaffected and traffic was rerouted, the incident occurred amid Iran's retaliatory drone strikes against UAE targets following US-Israeli strikes targeting Iranian officials. The outage caused heightened error rates and latency across affected platforms, though existing instances in mec1-az1 remained operational. AWS advised customers to fail over to other AWS Regions and expects full recovery to take several hours.