A significant power outage in the Middle East region of Amazon Web Services disrupted several cloud services on March 1, 2026, affecting customers operating in the me central 1 region. The outage was traced to an unusual physical incident in which external objects reportedly struck a data center facility, resulting in sparks and a fire.
According to official incident updates, emergency responders required a full shutdown of electrical systems at the affected facility to manage the situation safely. This included the suspension of both primary power supply and backup generators. The disruption was localized to a single Availability Zone identified as mec1 az2 within the me central 1 region.
The incident began around 4:30 AM PST, when connectivity and power irregularities were first detected. By approximately 4:51 AM PST, AWS initiated an investigation into reported service interruptions. At 6:09 AM PST, the company confirmed that a localized power failure had occurred in the specified Availability Zone.
The outage had a direct impact on core infrastructure services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store and Amazon Relational Database Service. EC2 instances hosted within mec1 az2 experienced service interruptions due to the sudden loss of power. Similarly, storage volumes and managed database instances in that zone were temporarily unavailable.
Customers also reported significant issues with networking operations. Several API functions related to networking experienced throttling errors or failed responses. These included calls such as AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable and DescribeNetworkInterfaces. The impairment of networking APIs affected resource management and scaling operations for businesses relying on automated cloud infrastructure.
To mitigate the impact, AWS implemented traffic weighting and rerouting strategies. Requests were redirected to unaffected Availability Zones within the same region to maintain partial service continuity. This approach is part of AWS standard resilience architecture, which distributes workloads across multiple isolated zones to minimize the risk of complete regional failure.
Cloud experts note that while multi zone deployment reduces operational risk, workloads confined to a single Availability Zone are more vulnerable during localized incidents. The event highlights the importance of designing highly available architectures that span multiple zones to ensure business continuity.
AWS continues to monitor the situation and provide status updates through its official service health dashboard. Restoration efforts focus on safely bringing infrastructure back online once authorities clear the affected facility.
The disruption underscores the potential operational impact of physical infrastructure incidents on digital services. As businesses increasingly rely on cloud platforms for critical operations, resilience planning and geographic redundancy remain essential components of enterprise technology strategies.
