AWS ME-CENTRAL-1 Region Faces Major Outage Due to Power Issue

AWS is currently experiencing a major outage in its ME-CENTRAL-1 (Middle East) region, specifically affecting the mec1-az2 availability zone. The incident, which began around 4:30 AM PST on March 1, 2026, was caused by objects striking a data center, creating sparks and fire that led to a complete power shutdown.

The outage has impacted a wide range of AWS services, with 45 services reporting issues and one service (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) being disrupted. Affected services include core infrastructure components like EC2, EBS, RDS, and Lambda, as well as higher-level services such as SageMaker, CloudFront, and S3. The scope of the impact demonstrates how a single availability zone failure can cascade across an entire region's service ecosystem.

According to AWS's latest updates, the fire department shut off power to the facility and generators while working to contain the fire. As of the most recent communication, power has not yet been restored to the affected availability zone, and AWS expects recovery to take "several hours" once permission is granted to restore power and connectivity safely.

Customers are experiencing various issues depending on their specific use cases. EC2 instance launches are impaired in the affected zone, and networking-related APIs (AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces) are experiencing increased error rates. AWS has provided specific mitigation strategies, including retrying failed API requests, explicitly passing IDs in API calls, and considering alternative AWS regions for critical workloads.

The incident highlights the importance of proper architecture design for cloud applications. AWS notes that customers running applications redundantly across availability zones were not impacted by this event, emphasizing the value of distributed deployment strategies. For those needing immediate recovery, AWS recommends restoring from backups or launching replacement resources in unaffected zones or alternate regions.

This outage serves as a reminder that even with AWS's robust infrastructure and multiple availability zones, localized physical incidents can still cause significant regional disruptions. The company has committed to providing updates every 1-2 hours until full recovery is achieved, with the next scheduled update at 3:30 PM PST.

For developers and businesses operating in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region, this incident underscores the need for comprehensive disaster recovery planning and the importance of designing systems that can gracefully handle regional failures. The extensive list of affected services demonstrates how interconnected modern cloud architectures have become, where a single point of failure can impact dozens of dependent services simultaneously.