Service disruption: Increased Error Rates

Update timeline

1. monitoring Mar 03, 2026, 12:19 AM UTC

   We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruptions affecting the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1) and the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region (ME-SOUTH-1). Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure. These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage. We are working closely with local authorities and prioritizing the safety of our personnel throughout our recovery efforts. In the ME-CENTRAL-1 (UAE) Region, two of our three Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) remain significantly impaired. The third Availability Zone (mec1-az1) continues to operate normally, though some services have experienced indirect impact due to dependencies on the affected zones. In the ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain) Region, one facility has been impacted. Across both regions, customers are experiencing elevated error rates and degraded availability for services including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon RDS, and the AWS Management Console and CLI. We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved. In parallel with efforts to restore the physical infrastructure at the affected sites, we are pursuing multiple software-based recovery paths that do not depend on the underlying facilities being fully brought back online. For Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB, we are actively working to restore data access and service availability through software mitigations, including deploying updates to enable S3 to operate within the current infrastructure constraints and remediating impaired DynamoDB tables to restore read and write availability for dependent services. Our focus on restoring these foundational services is deliberate, as recovery of Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB will in turn enable a broad range of dependent AWS services to recover. For other affected service APIs, we are deploying targeted software updates to reduce error rates and restore functionality where possible, independent of the physical recovery timeline. We are also working to restore access to the AWS Management Console and CLI through network-level changes that route traffic away from the affected infrastructure. While these software-based mitigations can address many of the service-level impacts, some recovery actions are constrained by the physical state of the affected facilities — meaning that full restoration of certain services will require the underlying infrastructure to be repaired and brought back online. Across all services, our teams are working in parallel on both the physical restoration of the affected facilities and these software-based mitigations, with the goal of restoring as much customer access as possible as quickly as possible, even ahead of full infrastructure recovery. In addition, we are prioritizing the restoration of services and tools that enable customers to back up and migrate their data and applications out of the affected regions. Finally, even as we work to restore these facilities, the ongoing conflict in the region means that the broader operating environment in the Middle East remains unpredictable. We recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East consider taking action now to backup data and potentially migrate your workloads to alternate AWS Regions. We recommend customers exercise their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected regions. For customers requiring guidance on alternate regions, we recommend considering AWS Regions in the United States, Europe, or Asia Pacific, as appropriate for your latency and data residency requirements. We will continue to provide updates as recovery progresses and as the situation evolves. Our next update will be provided by 9:00 PM PST on March 2, 2026, or sooner if new information becomes available.