Dubai — Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed it is continuing to work on a localised power issue affecting multiple Availability Zones in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region, warning customers that full recovery remains several hours away.
In its latest update at 12:52 AM PST on March 2, AWS said the disruption is impacting mec1-az2 and mec1-az3, with customers experiencing increased EC2 API errors and instance launch failures across the region. Launching new instances is currently not possible. Existing instances in mec1-az1 should not be affected, although broader regional disruption persists.
Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 are also reporting significant error rates and elevated latencies, adding to operational challenges for organisations relying on storage and database services in the UAE region.
“AWS said it is actively working to restore power and connectivity to the affected Availability Zones.”
Once infrastructure stability is re-established, teams will begin recovery of impacted resources. An additional update is expected by 2:00 AM PST, or sooner if the situation changes.
Earlier Escalation
An earlier update at 10:46 PM PST on March 1 confirmed that the localized power issue had expanded to affect another Availability Zone, mec1-az3, while customers also began experiencing increased EC2 API and instance launch errors in mec1-az1. At that stage, AWS acknowledged that launching new instances across the region was not possible, though existing instances in mec1-az1 were expected to remain unaffected.
Other core services, including DynamoDB and S3, were already experiencing significant error rates and latency as engineers worked to restore power and connectivity. Recovery was initially projected to take multiple hours, a timeline that has since been extended.
Customer Advisory
AWS is advising affected customers to fail over to another AWS Region where possible and back up critical data to mitigate potential impact. Organisations with multi-region disaster recovery strategies are likely to be better positioned to manage service continuity.
The incident highlights the importance of geographic redundancy and resilience planning, particularly for enterprises running mission-critical workloads within the Middle East’s rapidly expanding cloud ecosystem.
Further updates are expected as restoration efforts continue.
