A major power outage in the AWS me-central-1 (Middle East) region on March 1, 2026, resulted from an unusual physical incident where external objects struck a data center, triggering sparks and a fire.
The event caused significant disruptions to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services, networking APIs, and resource availability in a single Availability Zone (mec1-az2).
According to AWS incident reports, the fire department mandated a complete shutdown of power to the facility, including backup generators, while they managed the situation. The resulting power loss incapacitated EC2 Instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) databases within the affected zone.
Timeline of the Incident
The disruption began around 4:30 AM PST, with AWS officially investigating connectivity and power issues by 4:51 AM PST. By 6:09 AM PST, AWS confirmed the localized power failure in…