Middle East AWS Outage Sends Shockwaves Through Cloud Infrastructure Service

## Executive Summary A physical impact and resulting fire at an AWS data center in the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) availability zone caused an extensive outage on March 1, knocking down EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and degrading database and API services across ME-CENTRAL-1 and later ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain). AWS isolated the affected AZ (mec1-az2), routed traffic away from the compromised zone, and restored many services, though several APIs and zone-tied resources experienced prolonged outages; the report emphasizes the importance of multi‑AZ redundancy and provides a timeline and mitigation guidance for affected customers.