Amazon Web Services (AWS) lost an availability zone in the UAE on March 1st due to “objects that struck the datacenter, creating sparks and fire.” The fire department cut power to the facility and its generators.
This is the first confirmed instance of a major hyperscaler availability zone being knocked offline by what appears to be kinetic military action.
The incident coincided with Iranian missile and drone strikes across the UAE, hitting airports, ports, and residential areas. When Reuters asked AWS directly whether the datacenter hit was connected to America attacking Iran, the company declined to confirm or deny.
The affected zone is mec1-az2 in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region. EC2 API errors cascaded beyond the struck zone, with networking calls — AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces — failing across the region. AWS reported “positive signs of recovery” by the afternoon and estimated two to three more hours to resolution.
BC/DR Plan for “Objects”
“Objects” keeps the incident in operational language rather than appropriate disaster planning language. A hurricane hurls objects. An earthquake hurls objects. Standard business insurance and cloud service agreements typically exclude acts of war. If AWS called this debris or projectiles from an Iranian military strike it triggers force majeure clauses and potentially voids service level commitments across every customer contract in the region.
Going for Broke
The architectural promise of availability zones is isolation. One zone goes down, your workload fails over to another. That held for compute, partially. But control plane APIs leaked errors across zone boundaries, meaning customers couldn’t programmatically manage resources even in the unaffected zones. The region’s data plane kept running; the management plane didn’t.
Cloud providers have modeled for earthquakes, floods, power grid failures. The threat model for “your datacenter is in a country that just got hit with ballistic missiles” was always implicit in the Gulf region build-out. Now it’s explicit, despite the “object” language.
AWS built ME-CENTRAL-1 to capture Gulf state digital transformation revenue. The physical risk was priced into the infrastructure design with multiple zones and redundant power yet never into the sales narrative.
Customers selecting data sovereignty or latency centers now see the beginning of what Trump’s war mongering means for availability guarantees.