Service disruption in the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) Regions

AWS Health Dashboard timeline for the multi-day disruption that began in the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region on March 1, 2026, and extended to the ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) Region.

Mar 1, 2026 12:51 UTC — We are investigating issues with AWS services in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region.

Mar 1, 2026 14:09 UTC — 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.

Mar 1, 2026 17:41 UTC — 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.

Mar 2, 2026 06:46 UTC — 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. For customers that can, we recommend failing away to another AWS Region at this time.

Mar 2, 2026 10:53 UTC — 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.

Mar 2, 2026 14:22 UTC — 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.

Mar 3, 2026 00:19 UTC — 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.

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. 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. 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.

Mar 3, 2026 16:14 UTC — With the immediate phase of this event now better understood, we are moving to a more targeted communication model. Going forward, updates will be delivered directly to affected customers through the AWS Personal Health Dashboard. We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions.

Apr 30, 2026 07:25 UTC — We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruption. The Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) has suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East and is currently unable to reliably support customer applications. While some workloads continue to function normally, we strongly recommend customers migrate all accessible resources to other Regions and restore inaccessible resources from remote backups as soon as possible. Relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations in this AWS Region. This process is expected to take several months.