Fire at UAE data centre disrupts Amazon cloud services

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos, experienced a major service disruption after a fire broke out at one of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates, affecting several cloud services used by businesses globally.

The incident occurred at approximately 4:30 p.m. Dubai time on Sunday after an unidentified object struck part of the facility, causing sparks and triggering a fire. The company confirmed the disruption through updates posted on its cloud Health Dashboard, noting that emergency responders were forced to shut down both primary electricity supply and backup generators to safely extinguish the blaze.

AWS said the outage affected one of its Availability Zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region, a cluster of data centres designed to ensure redundancy and reliability. Availability Zones typically allow services to continue running even if one facility fails, but the fire and resulting power shutdown disrupted operations in the affected zone.

Customers face disruptions across multiple cloud services

The outage triggered elevated error rates and performance issues across several core AWS services. Users reported difficulties launching EC2 instances, which function as virtual servers, while others experienced problems accessing networking tools and application programming interfaces.

In addition, AWS storage and database services, including DynamoDB and S3, recorded increased latency and operational failures. At one point during the disruption, customers were unable to launch new virtual servers in the affected region, although some existing services remained operational.

AWS acknowledged the severity of the incident and warned customers that full recovery would take several hours. The company advised affected users to temporarily shift operations to other AWS regions where possible to minimise downtime and maintain business continuity.

“We are actively working to restore power and connectivity,” the company said in its official update, adding that recovery efforts would continue once the facility was declared safe and electricity supply was restored.

Incident raises infrastructure resilience concerns

While the exact cause of the object that struck the data centre remains unclear, the incident occurred amid rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Reports indicate that missile and drone attacks have recently targeted infrastructure across multiple countries in the region, including the UAE, raising concerns about the vulnerability of critical digital infrastructure.

Despite the disruption, AWS emphasised that the incident was isolated and did not affect its broader global infrastructure. The company operates more than 120 Availability Zones across dozens of regions worldwide, allowing traffic to be rerouted to alternative locations when outages occur.

To reduce the impact of the outage, AWS implemented mitigation measures, including restoring limited networking functionality and enabling customers to reassign Elastic IP addresses to unaffected systems. However, full service restoration remained dependent on safely restoring power to the affected facility.

The disruption highlights the growing reliance of modern businesses on cloud infrastructure and the risks posed when critical data centre operations are interrupted, even temporarily.

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