Amazon acknowledged late Monday, March 3, that two of its data centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, taking the facilities offline. Amazon Web Services (AWS) update at 7:19 p.m. EST said that the outages were caused by drone strikes tied to the “ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” AWS said, “In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure.” It added, “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”The company warned that instability is likely to continue in the Middle East, making operations “unpredictable.” AWS added notices to the top of its marketplaces in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE alerting customers of an “extended delivery time in your area.”The incident occurred March 1 morning, with the company posting to its Amazon Web Services health dashboard at the time that “objects” hit data centers in the UAE, causing “sparks and fire”. In an update to its AWS health dashboard, the company said that two facilities in the United Arab Emirates were “directly struck” by drones on Sunday, causing extensive damage. A site in Bahrain was damaged due to a drone strike that occurred nearby.

Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE); Services impacted: Multiple services; Severity: Disrupted

Mar 02 4:19 PM PST: We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruptions affecting the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1). Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure. These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts.In the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region, two of our three Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) remain significantly impaired. The third Availability Zone (mec1-az1) continues to operate normally, though some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones. In the ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) Region, one facility has been impacted. Across both regions, customers are experiencing elevated error rates and degraded availability for services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and CLI. We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved.In parallel with efforts to restore the physical infrastructure at the affected sites, we are pursuing multiple software-based recovery paths that do not depend on the underlying facilities being fully brought back online. For Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB, we are actively working to restore data access and service availability through software mitigations, including deploying updates to enable S3 to operate within the current infrastructure constraints and remediating impaired DynamoDB tables to restore read and write availability for dependent services. Our focus on restoring these foundational services is deliberate, as recovery of Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB will in turn enable a broad range of dependent AWS services to recover. For other affected service APIs, we are deploying targeted software updates to reduce error rates and restore functionality where possible, independent of the physical recovery timeline. We are also working to restore access to the AWS Management Console and CLI through network-level changes that route traffic away from the affected infrastructure. While these software-based mitigations can address many of the service-level impacts, some recovery actions are constrained by the physical state of the affected facilities — meaning that full restoration of certain services will require the underlying infrastructure to be repaired and brought back online. Across all services, our teams are working in parallel on both the physical restoration of the affected facilities and these software-based mitigations, with the goal of restoring as much customer access as possible as quickly as possible, even ahead of full infrastructure recovery. In addition, we are prioritizing the restoration of services and tools that enable customers to back up and migrate their data and applications out of the affected regions.Finally, even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable. We recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads to alternate AWS Regions. We recommend customers exercise their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions. For customers requiring guidance on alternate regions, we recommend considering AWS Regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, as appropriate for your latency and data residency requirements.We will continue to provide updates as recovery progresses and as the situation evolves. Our next update will be provided by 9:00 PM PST on March 2, 2026, or sooner if new information becomes available.Mar 02 1:36 PM PST: We continue to work towards recovery of the two impaired Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. We have partially restored access to the AWS Management Console, however, some pages will continue to load unsuccessfully until we have recovered core services and power. In parallel to the power and recovery efforts, we are working to restore access to tools and utilities to allow customers to backup and migrate their data. We have no updated guidance on expected recovery times, and still expect this to take at least a day to fully restore power and connectivity. We continue advising customers enact their disaster recovery plans and recover from remote backups into alternate AWS Regions. We will provide you with another update by 6:00 PM PST, or sooner if new information becomes available.Mar 02 9:59 AM PST: We continue to work towards recovery of the two impaired Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. The impact is causing elevated errors rates for both the Management Console and CLI. Our current expectation is that recovery will take at least a day to complete. We continue to recommend customers enact their disaster recovery plans and recover from remote backups into alternate AWS Regions. We will continue to provide periodic updates on recovery efforts. Our next update will be by 2:00 PM PST or sooner if new information becomes available.Mar 02 6:22 AM PST: We continue to work towards recovery of the two impaired Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. We are expecting recovery to take at least a day, as it requires repair of facilities, cooling and power systems, coordination with local authorities, and careful assessment to ensure the safety of our operators. EC2, Amazon DynamoDB and other AWS Services continue to experience significant error rates and elevated latencies.We recommend customers enact their disaster recovery plans and recover from remote backups into alternate AWS Regions, ideally in Europe. Further, we strongly advise customers to update their applications to ingest S3 data to an alternate AWS Region. We will provide an update by 11:00 AM PST on March 2, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 02 2:53 AM PST We wanted to provide more information on Amazon S3 given that there are two impaired Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. Amazon S3 is a regional service and designed to withstand the total loss of a single Availability Zone while maintaining S3’s durability and availability. When the mec1-az2 AZ was powered off at approximately 4:00 AM PST on Sunday, March 1, S3 continued to operate normally. As the second AZ became impaired, S3 error rates increased. With two Availability Zones significantly impacted, customers are seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress. We strongly advise customers to update their applications to ingest S3 data to an alternate AWS Region. As soon as practically possible, we will begin the restoration of our two Availability Zones which will include a careful assessment of data health and any repair of storage if necessary.In addition, we can confirm that the AWS Management Console and command line interface (CLI) are disrupted by the failure of two Availability Zones. We continue to work towards recovery across all services, and we will provide an update by 6:00 AM PST on March 2, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 02 12:52 AM PST: We continue to work on a localized power issue affecting multiple Availability Zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3). Customers are experiencing increased EC2 API errors and instance launch failures across the region, and it is not currently possible to launch new instances; existing instances in mec1-az1 should not be affected. Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 are also experiencing significant error rates and elevated latencies. We are actively working to restore power and connectivity, after which we will begin recovery of affected resources; full recovery is still expected to be many hours away. We recommend that affected customers failover, and backup any critical data, to another AWS Region. We will provide an update by 2:00 AM PST, or sooner if the situation changes.Mar 01 10:46 PM PST: We can confirm that a localized power issue has affected another Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region (mec1-az3). Customers are also experiencing increased EC2 APIs and instance launch errors for the remaining zone (mec1-az1). At this point it is not possible to launch new instances in the region, although existing instances should not be affected in mec1-az1. Other AWS Services, such as DynamoDB and S3 are also experiencing significant error rates and latencies. We are actively working to restore power and connectivity, at which time we will begin to work to recover affected resources. As of this time, we expect recovery is multiple hours away. For customers that can, we recommend failing away to another AWS Region at this time. We will provide an update by 12:00 AM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 9:59 PM PST: We are investigating additional connectivity issues and error rates in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region.Mar 01 6:01 PM PST We confirm the recovery of the AssociateAddress API requests. We have also applied a change that enables customers to disassociate Elastic IP addresses from resources that are impacted by the underlying power issue. With these mitigations, customers can now successfully create and associate new network addresses in the unaffected AZs as well as re-associate Elastic IPs from resources in the affected zone to resources in the unaffected zones. We still do not have an ETA for power restoration at this time. For customers that can, we recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where applicable. We will provide another update by 10:00 PM, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 4:26 PM PST: We are seeing significant signs of recovery for AssociateAddress requests, and continue to work toward fully mitigating this issue. This combined with the earlier recovery of the AllocateAddress API means customers can now successfully create and associate new network addresses in the unaffected AZs. Other AWS Services are also now observing sustained improvement as a result of the EC2 Networking APIs recovery. We are now focusing on implementing a change that will allow customers to Disassociate Elastic IP addresses from resources that are impacted by the underlying power issue. We expect this specific mitigation to take another hour to complete. We do not have an ETA for power restoration at this time. For customers that can, we recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where applicable. We will provide another update by 6:30 PM, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 2:28 PM PST: We are seeing positive signs of recovery for many of the EC2 APIs, such as Describes and AllocateAddress. We recognize that customers are still experiencing errors when attempting to call the AssociateAddress API, and are unable to disassociate addresses from resources that are affected by the underlying power issue. We continue to work on multiple parallel paths to mitigate both of these issues. We recommend continuing to retry requests wherever possible. We expect our current mitigation efforts for these specific issues to complete within the the two to three hours. As we progress with these mitigation efforts, customers will observe higher success rates for these operations. Additionally, we are investigating ways to speed up these specific mitigation efforts, but are ensuring we do so safely. As of this time, power restoration is still several hours away. We will provide another update by 5:30 PM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 12:14 PM PST: We are aware that some customers are experiencing errors when calling EC2 APIs, specifically networking related APIs (AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces). We are actively working on multiple paths to mitigate these issues. For customers experiencing throttling errors on the AllocateAddress APIs, we recommend retrying any failed API requests. We are deploying a configuration change to mitigate the AssociateAddress API errors and expect recovery in the next few hours. DescribeRouteTable and DescribeNetworkInterfaces API calls without specifying zone, Interface or Instance IDs are expected to fail until we restore the impacted zone. We recommend customers to pass these IDs explicitly in these API requests. For customers that can, we recommend considering using alternate AWS Regions. We will provide another update by 3:30 PM PST, or sooner if we have more to share.Mar 01 9:41 AM PST: We want to provide some additional information on the power issue in a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. 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. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally. Customers who were running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event. EC2 Instance launches will continue to be impaired in the impacted AZ. We recommend that customers continue to retry any failed API requests. If immediate recovery of an affected resource (EC2 Instance, EBS Volume, RDS DB Instance, etc.) is required, we recommend restoring from your most recent backup, by launching replacement resources in one of the unaffected zones, or an alternate AWS Region. We will provide an update by 12:30 PM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 8:59 AM PST: We continue to work toward restoring power in the affected Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region (mec1-az2). In parallel, we are actively working on improving error rates and latencies that some customers are observing for EC2 Networking and EC2 Describe APIs. Due to increased demand in the unaffected Availability Zones, customers may experience longer than usual provisioning times or may need to retry requests for certain instance types, or pick an alternative instance type. We will provide an update by 10:30 AM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 7:09 AM PST: We wanted to provide some additional information on the isolated power issue. At this time, most AWS Services have weighted away from the affected Availability Zone (mec1-az2) and are seeing recovery for their affected operations and workflows. For EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, and other resources that are impacted in the affected Zone, we will have a longer tail of recovery. At this time, power has not yet been restored to the affected AZ. For now, we recommend continuing to retry any failed API requests. If immediate recovery is required, we recommend customers restore from EBS Snapshots and/or replace affected resources by launching replacement resources in one of the unaffected zones, or an alternate region. As of this time, recovery is still several hours away. We will provide an update by 8:30 AM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 6:09 AM PST: We can confirm that a localized power issue has affected a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region (mec1-az2). EC2 Instances, DB Instances, EBS Volumes, and others resources are currently unavailable and will experience connectivity issues at this time. Other AWS Services are also experiencing error rates and latencies for some workflows. We have weighed away traffic for most services at this time. We recommend customers utilize one of the other Availability Zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region at this time, as existing instances in other AZ’s remain unaffected by this issue. We are actively working to restore power and connectivity, at which time we will begin to work to recover affected resources. As of this time, we expect recovery is multiple hours away. We will provide an update by 7:15 AM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.Mar 01 5:19 AM PST: We are investigating connectivity and power issues affecting APIs and instances in a single Availability Zone (mec1-az2) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region due to a localized power issue. Existing instances in this zone will also be affected. Other AWS Services may also be experiencing increased errors and latencies for their workflows, and we are working to route requests away from this affected Availability Zone. We recommend customers make use of other Availability Zones at this time. Targeting new launches using RunInstances in the remaining AZs should succeed. Existing instances in the other AZs are not affected.Mar 01 4:51 AM PST: We are investigating issues with AWS services in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region.