A major disruption has hit the Middle East cloud infrastructure after an Iranian missile struck the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in the UAE’s mec1-az2 availability zone. The attack caused a fire, prompting the fire department to cut power completely, including backup generators. As a result, all services in that zone, including EC2, RDS, and EBS, are currently offline or impaired.
The missile strike is being treated as a rare “black swan” event. Normally, cloud outages are caused by software glitches or localized hardware failures. A physical attack that damages an entire zone is extremely unusual, showing the vulnerability of even the most secure cloud facilities to geopolitical tensions.
AWS, a leading cloud service provider, operates multiple availability zones in each region to ensure redundancy. In the UAE, this means mec1-az1, mec1-az2, and mec1-az3. The incident in mec1-az2 highlights the importance of this design, as customers with Multi-AZ setups saw their traffic shift automatically to healthy zones. However, single-AZ workloads were directly impacted and may require restoration from backups.
AWS has advised customers not to attempt launching new resources in mec1-az2 until power is restored. An update from AWS is expected shortly, and companies relying on the affected AZ are being urged to monitor dashboards closely.
