An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Availability Zone is experiencing an outage in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after it "was impacted by objects that struck the data center."
AWS did not provide further details about the objects, but the incident comes as the UAE faces missile and drone attacks from Iran. Update: Three data centers have been damaged by drone strikes, with ME-SOUTH-1 also impacted, more here.
The unidentified objects impacted the ME-CENTRAL-1 region, in particular bringing the mec1-az2 AZ offline.
The objects "created sparks and fire," AWS said. "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 have reported errors when calling EC2 APIs, specifically networking-related APIs (AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces).
Update: Amazon said that this issue has also brought mec1-az3 down, while the remaining AZ has experienced issues. "With two Availability Zones significantly impacted, customers are seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress," the company said. "We strongly advise customers to update their applications to ingest S3 data to an alternate AWS Region. As soon as practically possible, we will begin the restoration of our two Availability Zones, which will include a careful assessment of data health and any repair of storage if necessary."
On Saturday, Iran fired 137 missiles and 209 drones across the UAE, its Ministry of Defence said; the number of attacks on Sunday is not yet known. At least one person has been killed at Abu Dhabi’s airport, and other critical infrastructure sites have been hit.
Iran has waged a number of retaliatory attacks on US assets in the Middle East, after strikes this weekend by the US and Israel that killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials.
This story is developing, we will update it as we learn more.