Amazon AWS Outage UAE Bahrain Disrupts Cloud Services
Amazon AWS Outage UAE Bahrain hit data centers on March 2 and degraded S3, raising operational risk for cloud customers and prompting failover guidance.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- AWS outage in UAE and Bahrain impaired two of three availability zones and degraded S3 ingest and egress.
- Local power cuts after objects struck data centers necessitated repairs and coordination with authorities for restoration.
- AWS advised failover to other AZs or regions; recovery was expected to take at least one day.
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Amazon (AMZN) experienced an AWS outage in the UAE and Bahrain on March 2, 2026, when objects struck data centers in both countries. The incidents triggered power cuts, degraded S3 data ingest and egress, and prompted estimates of at least a one-day recovery.
Facility Damage and Timeline
At 1:56 a.m. ET, the mes1-az2 availability zone in Bahrain suffered a localized power issue that remained unresolved by 9:23 a.m. ET. Later that day, at 5:51 p.m. ET, the mec1-az2 site in the UAE was hit by objects that caused sparks and fire, leading local authorities to cut power to contain the blaze. Power disruptions then spread to mec1-az3 in the UAE at 11:46 p.m. ET, impairing two of the region’s three availability zones.
Service Impact and Recovery
The outages degraded regional connectivity and caused power interruptions that affected single-region workloads. Snowflake reported knock-on disruptions linked to the events. Recovery will require repairs to facility structures, cooling and power systems, and coordination with local authorities, with restoration expected to take at least one day.
AWS advised customers to fail over to other availability zones or regions where their architectures allow. The incidents occurred amid U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and subsequent Iranian missile and drone attacks on Gulf targets, including the UAE and Bahrain. Although some reports connected the disruptions to retail operations in Abu Dhabi, AWS updates confirmed no e-commerce warehouse closures or delivery halts in the city.
