Cloud Users Anxious After UAE AWS Hub Reports Outage

For many cloud users across the Middle East, Sunday turned uneasy when Amazon Web Services (AWS)suffered a disruption at one of its United Arab Emirates data centres. The issue began after an object hit the facility at about 4:30 p.m. Dubai time, sparking a fire and triggering an emergency shutdown.

The company explained the situation through its Health Dashboard. In one update, it said “one of our Availability Zones was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire.” Fire crews switched off both the main power and backup systems while putting out the flames.

Although the incident happened on the same day Iranian projectiles hit parts of the UAE, AWS did not confirm any link to regional tensions. The strike came amid Iran’s response to US and Israeli attacks that reportedly killed senior Iranian figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Hours of disruption and rising error rates

By around 1130 GMT, users across the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region began reporting trouble. Launching EC2 instances became difficult. Networking APIs slowed. DynamoDB, S3 and other services showed higher error rates. AWS later noted that creating new virtual servers was not possible in mec1-az1, although existing ones continued to run.

The company told customers it was “actively working to restore power and connectivity,” but warned that recovery would take several hours. It even advised some users to switch to another AWS Region while engineers worked on the outage.

Over the following hours, AWS rolled out fixes. Some networking functions returned, and users were able to reassign Elastic IPs away from affected parts of the region. Yet the company stressed that full restoration depended on safe power return.

Growing regional concerns

The broader security situation in the Middle East continues to raise questions. Iran’s retaliatory strikes have extended across several countries, including the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. These waves of missiles and drones have heightened fears about how secure critical infrastructure remains beneath escalating geopolitical pressure.

Globally, AWS runs 123 Availability Zones in 39 regions. It said no other zones were affected by the UAE incident and that traffic was being rerouted to maintain service continuity.