AWS Power Outage in Middle East Triggers Major Disruption to EC2 and Networking Services

On March 1, 2026 a physical incident (external objects striking a data center and causing sparks/fire) forced the AWS me-central-1 mec1-az2 facility to be fully powered down by emergency responders, causing localized failures of EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and networking APIs; AWS rerouted traffic to other Availability Zones, implemented API mitigations (including forceful disassociation of Elastic IPs), and advised customers to use alternate AZs/regions and restore from backups while awaiting physical power restoration.