Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), the cloud computing arm of Amazon founded by Jeff Bezos, suffered a service disruption after a fire incident at its UAE facility.
According to reports, an unidentified object struck one of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates, triggering a fire at about 4:30 p.m. Dubai time on Sunday.
The AWS confirmed this in a statement posted on its Health Dashboard. The company said the fire department shut down both utility power and backup generators as firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze.
What they are saying
AWS posted updates on its cloud Health Dashboard at various times during the day: an excerpt from one of the updates reads,
- “One of our Availability Zones was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire,” AWS said. Availability Zones are regional clusters of data centres designed to ensure redundancy and reliability.
It remains unclear whether the incident was directly linked to the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran. However, the fire broke out on the same day Iranian projectiles struck parts of the UAE. The attacks were part of Iran’s retaliation following US and Israeli strikes that reportedly killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior officials.
- According to AWS, the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region outage, which began affecting cloud services from around 1130 GMT, will last until the end of the day.
- The downtime resulted in heightened error levels across various platforms. Users are encountering difficulties launching EC2 instances, accessing networking APIs, and using DynamoDB and S3, in addition to increased latency.
AWS at some point stated it was not possible to launch new instances(virtual computer servers) in the region, although existing instances should not be affected in mec1-az1. Other AWS Services, such as DynamoDB and S3 were 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”.
Over several hours, AWS rolled out mitigation measures. These included restoring some EC2 networking functions and enabling customers to reassign Elastic IP addresses away from affected resources. Despite these steps, AWS said full recovery would take several hours, pending the safe restoration of power.
What you should know
Iran’s response has since spread across the Middle East. Missile and drone attacks have been launched against US bases and allied targets in several countries.
These include the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The developments have heightened concerns about the security of critical infrastructure in the region.
Globally, AWS operates 123 Availability Zones across 39 regions. The company stressed that other data centre groups were not impacted by the incident and that traffic was being rerouted to maintain service continuity.
