Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE)
health.aws.amazon.com
health.aws.amazon.com
Mar 01 9:41 AM PST
We want to provide some additional information on the power issue in a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally.
this would require human intervention and I am a bit worried what if the strike can happen again and human lives might be lost.
IIRC there have been cases in history where sometimes a same location is targeted across multiple days. Obviously, AWS might have local employees working in the region but would there be an evaluation of this threat itself within the relevant team in AWS. What if they try to bring the service back but then missiles are struck again and what if human lives might be lost on it. Let's just hope that it could be part of a evaluation as well.
that's the difference between heroes and ordinary employees who bitch about having to go into the office twice a month.
same as the stories you hear of guys taking snow-cats up a mountain in a blizzard to restore phone circuits or radio transmitters gone offline.
attacking datacenters within a particular region so that service would have a hard time.
I guess someone can use some other regions DC to have more than (regional?) AZ but for mission critical infra, I can see that having sometimes issue too and you genuinely can't predict any of all of this.
That being said, There should be more than one AZ reliance but IMO also off-site or multi-cloud backups should also be preferred/used as well.
Off-site backups/Multi Cloud Strategy while encrypting data (and keeping the key safe, key point) might be a better strategy for such mission critical infrastructure.
My gut feeling says that they would be safer at homes than at datacenters. The only large info I have heard is attack on hotels, this datacenter etc. (atleast till right now).
> but in the fog of war maybe the data center wasn't the target?
We can't say this for sure but even if that was the case, I do think that they would see some damage was caused and then, try to double tap it for even more damage. So chances are, even if it wasn't the target previously, it might be the target now?
Both Americans and Israelis are known for double taps. Surely Iran can adapt their tactics too.
Amazon has self-propelled robots that handle their logistics and fulfillment, don't they? Send in the robots.
Essentially, he was trying to assure us that no-no-no, we don’t need multiple zones like the public clouds, they can instead guarantee 100% uninterrupted power under all circumstances.
A bit bored and annoyed, I pointed to the giant red button conspicuously placed in the middle of a pillar and asked what it is for.
“Oh, that’s in case there’s a fire!”
“What does it do?”
“It cuts… the power… uhh… for the safety of the fire department.”
“So… if there’s a wisp of smoke in a corner somewhere, the fireys turn up, the first thing they do is… cut the power?”
“… yes.”
“Not 100% then, is it?”
one day, a colo customer hit the wrong button on the way out, and uhh, there was an outage
That was when we installed the Big Clear Button Cover.
There was a locally very funny situation for a while when a tech influencer was insisting both equinix sites could be shut down by a single building collapse. He was wrong, but he wasn't so wrong that people shouldn't make better infrastructure decisions.
It would still cause chaos and possible power issues.
Needs to be taken in context with some Sydney buildings having maintenance defects a few years after they open. Largely due to inferior materials imported from china. The building in question developed some cracks in supporting beams and was briefly evacuated. There was never a chance it was going to topple on its own in a way that impacted more than 1/2 datacenters, so he pivoted to possible terrorism, but even thats largely nonsensical.
I just went hunting for the case and couldnt find it. The gentleman in question had published the claim to his business that was it happens trying to build contacts with defense and intelligence agencies for third party threat assessment. As far as I can tell the business no longer exists and he has deleted their footprint.
But he also posted the claim on public mailing lists so I can probably trawl it up if necessary.
Aircraft routinely overfly the location either on departure from 34R or approach for 16L.
Well that's a way of phrasing it.
I assume these were missiles.
AFAIK, there have been no confirmed signs of civilian sites being targeted directly, and it would also be unlikely that actual missiles would cause so little damage that you could patch your datacenter up and get it ready to go within hours.
dubai airport, residential buildings, hotels, ports - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/several-loud-blast...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/03/01/i...
Bahrain - https://bh.usembassy.gov/security-alert-update-5-u-s-embassy...
You can google for other targets in Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Iraq, Cyprus and Kuwait
Local and official news all say that these were hit by debris from intercepted missiles/drones (on their way to somewhere else). There is a major difference between this, vs. if those buildings were directly being targeted.
AFAICT your linked sources indicate that the oil installations and ports were targets, but not the hotels and buildings.
I'm asking in good faith as this makes a significant difference.
Finding these take time so I am sorry if this is going to be the last of these sources I'll paste, for example Bahrain luxury apartments building being hit:
https://edition.cnn.com/world/video/bahrain-iran-drone-strik...
US warning that high rise buildings in Bahrain are being targeted by Iranians drones:
Seems like it should be somewhat easier to bomb 50 datacenters than it would be to hack and disrupt 1000s of different services.
Again, this is just me thinking out loud on a tangent and this doesn't have much to do with this story, but I felt it was an interesting thought to share nonetheless.
The bigger part of me seems that if we someone nukes 50 datacenters all at once or say all of Amazon's datacenters at once, then the data stored in there would simply be gone and given so many datacenters are located in Virginia,USA iirc or just so many companies being reliant on few datacenter providers.
The larger threat to me with the lose of data is firstly the panic within public fronting services but also, with Hedge Funds, Pension funds or banking datacenters who might be using these and if they lose the data, then its gonna cause even more public mayhem.
Some might be saying oh off-site backups exist but there has atleast been one instance, where a single Google accident had led to massive issues for a 135 Billion $ pension fund.
Relevant Kevin Faang video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GOAUyipnM4 [Google Accidentally Deletes $135 Billion Pension Fund, Chaos Ensues]
But why is this the case? Like, saving costs? Doesn't this recent attack on AWS DC does show that they aren't as safe as previously thought especially in a region of conflict.
Is there any particular reason as to why this is the case?
Previous outage news makes it sound like the cloud providers still have quite a few logical single points of failure.
I do think that though, atleast from the Anthropic decision prior, we know that Anthropic which was used by DoD should be on normal AWS datacenters.
I am saying this because, Dod Threatened to force take the source code of Anthropic if they don't agree to aggregious demands so that means that they don't have the source code.
Perhaps DoD used Anthropic within AWS Military modular DC's but I find it extremely unlikely.
I am almost certain that even with OpenAI who bent its knee to DoD, its still hosted on regular infrastructure and DoD is using these AI models on pretty sensitive tasks (During the Venezeula Maduro's capture, Anthropic/Claude were used iirc to handle some data analysis)
IMO Tho, Any Employee from Anthropic/OpenAI might know better tho about how these models are deployed.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/11/amazon-be...
For infrastructure reasons, we plonk datacenters down next to airports big enough to fly major hardware into, and near where the big oceanic cables come ashore… and for strategic reasons those are also the perfect places to place military bases
We seem to be really bad at separating those two. For example Starlink is basically military infrastructure now, used to guide bombs.
However, proximity to money/power tends to be a factor in business, and the bulk of datacentres cluster around US/EU/MENA/China/Japan
Additionally, StarLink et al are now able to directly communicate with cell phones. It therefore should be possible to route entirely in space between “data center satellites” and communications satellites and communicate directly with an end user device, avoiding the entire terrestrial internet.
To me it absolutely looks like the case in here, what are the chances three availability zones across two different countries have been attacked?
> The other AZs in the region are functioning normally. Customers who were running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event.
I bet that was an interesting sev2 ticket!
The other ones are not impacted. They always like to tell you to pay for more than one instance in different AZs so if this happens you don't get impacted.
> Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes.
So they're confirming actual aggression
so…
I think the idea can be that they are getting worse terms for America. Saddam Hussein from Iraq lost as well but the war was so messy that so so many americans died in bloodshed and gruesome ways and there was a whole gulf war syndrome within Army with severe PTSD.
This makes the people highly unreceptive of war and the govt should have more pressure from people. So in theory, America should've thought twice before attacking the same region.
I also think, that its hard to ever really remove an ideology. You definitely see ideologies of the past spring up in future and I think that sure they might lose the govt power but they would still have some influence for what its worth.
Also, Ayatollah was killed by these forces. Atleast the highly religious of people of Iran/politicians might spin the story to become religious which does have such ideas of inflicting maximum damage to the opponent at times.
I don't think that game theory can be applicable for religious/personal matters at times
Long term I think if the regime in Iran changes and better economic cooperation becomes possible everyone will benefit.
They mention that the datacenter had fires and sparks and they are mentioning hours of downtime but given the situation, How does that prevent the situation from happening again. It's best for people to use safer regions than the middle east in the moment as missiles might target the same datacenter seeing that some damage was caused.
Moving forward, will there be a demand (all be small) for nuclear bunker esque datacenters which can withstands missiles? I know absolutely nothing about constructing underground but can explosives not be used to create underground datacenters comparatively cheaply? One can also use revamped Nuclear bunkers (although the scale of AWS datacenters might be huge tho who knows)
Had some ideas which show that this idea might be interesting, https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00406-2
I am curious but what are the safety attempts made by Internet Exchange Providers or (had to search it up) but Submarine Cable landing stations, to me it feels like blowing these up leads to internet downtime across whole country / between providers.
You don't. Instead, you make sure your failover or DR setup is regularly tested and works.
Competition and deregulation and lack of attacks leads towards less robust installations to reduce costs. Geographically redundant installations help as long as all installations aren't targetted; and are valuable for operational concerns other than just attacks.
An out-of-control wildfire levels the entire city? The Big One hits the Bay Area? The entire city is flooded for a few months because the levees break during a Cat5 hurricane? Yeah, your DC will be completely ruined. And even if it isn't, you're probably not getting any outside power, generator fuel, or repair technicians for a while.
No matter how much money you pump into hardening your own super-bunker DC, there will always be disasters you aren't prepared for. At a certain point it just makes more financial sense to abandon the idea of invulnerability and build a redundant site a few states over. Accept that you will occasionally lose one, and only protect against incidents where mitigation is cheaper than occasionally rebuilding.
Those already exist. See for example Bahnhof's "Pionen - White Mountain" data center in Stockholm, or Cyberfort's "The Bunker" a bit west of London.
Its products are sequences of electrons, instead of atoms. But so are power plants. And in the context of what happens when they're hit by missiles, a factory, data center, and power plant all behave the same.
God forbid we'd ever say that it was struck by a missile or a munition in an act of war.
Their version from 2 days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3o-3pL79O4
It's insane. Jokes written 20 years ago work better today.
It's been extremely on point and it's sad how much criticism from the mid 2000s which was dismisses as "Not supporting America" was actually 100% on point and still fully valid and correct and prescient and on point 20 years later because the same exact old assholes are still in power and calling the shots and finally allowed to go weapons free on the geopolitical agenda's they've held for decades.
People didn't listen that the Bush Jr admin, who started middle east wars under fabricated pretenses and booted up the surveillance regime with the PATRIOT act and called war protests "Anti-american", was Fascist and they still aren't listening as a racist, sexist, rapist moron drives the US off the deep end and starts even more illegal and false wars and directs that same DHS Bush created to destroy the enemies of the state within.
Doesn’t really matter, we know trumps latest war is the cause
Conrad: I got three fuel cell lights, an AC bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, AC bus overload 1 and 2, Main Bus A and B out.
Aaron: Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux.
> At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire. We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally. Customers who were running their applications redundantly across the AZs are not impacted by this event. EC2 Instance launches will continue to be impaired in the impacted AZ. We recommend that customers continue to retry any failed API requests. If immediate recovery of an affected resource (EC2 Instance, EBS Volume, RDS DB Instance, etc.) is required, we recommend restoring from your most recent backup, by launching replacement resources in one of the unaffected zones, or an alternate AWS Region. We will provide an update by 12:30 PM PST, or sooner if we have additional information to share.
This has that same mechanical tone of an ice-cold captain dealing with a proximate situation providing exactly the information they know. No flavour commentary. Amazing. I fucking love it.
(Lightning at 1:03)