Operational issue – Multiple services (UAE)

The important quote from the timeline:

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.

Interesting adjacent theory is how much are datacenters becoming military target to strike as part of disrupting initial defenses. It doesn't seem it was the case in this instance, but I could see this becoming a more important target in future.

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.

Just one AZ, not the whole region:

> 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.

We have business in UAE. For whatever reason I defaulted to us-west-2 since these particular applications are not latency sensitive.

Amazon usually has 3 AVs per region, looks like there are surviving AVs but the system didn't switch over gracefully.

I bet that was an interesting sev2 ticket!

I wonder if this was bad targeting job or intentional. I appreciate the transparency and optimism in the status updates though!

> one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire.

God forbid we'd ever say that it was struck by a missile or a munition in an act of war.

We are living in increasingly weirder times.

Is this the one in Bahrain?

Has this ever happened ever in history of Cloud providers before this because of war?

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.

In Southern Europe some smaller web servers are intermittently not working, while big servers like YouTube are working fine. But I don't think it is related.