AWS UAE data centre hit by fire after Iranian missile strike, multiple cloud services disrupted
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AWS probes Middle East outage after objects strike data centre
Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a temporary shutdown at one of its UAE data centres in the me-central-1 region after objects struck the facility, causing sparks and a fire.
Amazon’s cloud computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reported a temporary shutdown at one of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates after objects struck the facility, causing sparks and a fire.
The incident has led to connectivity issues and increased error rates across several AWS services in the Middle East region, officially known as me-central-1.
According to AWS, the disruption began at around 4:30 AM PST.
What happened at the AWS UAE data centre?
In a statement, AWS said that one of its Availability Zones, identified as mec1-az2, was impacted after objects struck the data centre.
The impact created sparks and led to a fire inside the facility. Emergency teams responded, and the local fire department temporarily cut power to the affected site while extinguishing the fire.
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AWS explained that an “Availability Zone” consists of one or more physical data centres within a region. Each zone is designed to operate independently to improve resilience and reduce downtime.
The company added that it may take several hours to fully restore connectivity in the affected zone. Other Availability Zones in the UAE region are operating normally.
Which AWS services were affected?
According to an alert published on the AWS Health Dashboard, multiple services experienced increased error rates.
Impacted services include:
AWS Glue
AWS Resource Groups
AWS Service Catalog
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
AWS described the issue as an operational disruption involving multiple services in the UAE region.
Customers reported connectivity fluctuations and service errors during the incident.
The disruption occurred as the UAE faces heightened tensions following retaliatory missile and drone strikes linked to the ongoing conflict between Iran, the United States and Israel.
Several airports, ports and residential areas across the UAE and parts of the Gulf have reportedly been affected in recent days.
When asked whether the data centre incident was directly connected to the strikes, AWS did not confirm or deny any link.
The company’s statement focused only on the operational impact and restoration efforts.
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How does this matter for businesses?
AWS powers thousands of businesses, startups and government services across the Middle East. Even short disruptions can affect:
Online platforms
Banking systems
E-commerce services
Enterprise cloud workloads
The UAE region (me-central-1) plays a key role in providing low-latency cloud services to customers across the Gulf and neighbouring countries.
AWS has not provided an exact timeline for full recovery but stated that restoration efforts are ongoing.
Cloud infrastructure is built with redundancy, meaning multiple data centres operate within each region to prevent complete outages. However, physical damage to one Availability Zone can still impact performance temporarily.
