‘One of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire,’ said Amazon on its health status dashboard.
One of AWS’ data centers in the Middle East was struck and “impacted by objects” that sparked a fire on March 1 with services still down in the region as of Monday morning.
“One of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire,” said Amazon on its health status dashboard at around 7:30 a.m. ET on March 1.
“The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire,” the company added.
The fire on March 1 at the AWS data center in the United Arab Emirates comes amid Israeli and U.S. military strikes on Iran along with retaliatory attacks from the Iranian military.
As of around 6:00 a.m. ET Monday, Amazon said two of its Availability Zones in the United Arab Emirates are still impaired with major Amazon services like Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB “experiencing significant error rates and elevated latencies.”
“With two Availability Zones significantly impacted, customers are seeing high failure rates for data ingest and egress,” Amazon said.
Amazon Doesn’t Say What Objects Were
AWS did not disclose in its statement what the objects were that struck and caused the fire.
CRN has reached out to AWS for comment on the matter but has not heard back by press time.
Seattle-based AWS is an $853 billion tech giant that is investing hundreds of billions of dollars on expanding its data center footprint both in the U.S. and globally.
AWS ‘Strongly Advises Customers’ To Update Their IT; Many Servies ‘Disrupted’
Amazon is advising customers in the region to make changes to their IT environment as soon as possible.
“We strongly advise customers to update their applications to ingest S3 data to an alternate AWS Region,” Amazon said. “As soon as practically possible, we will begin the restoration of our two Availability Zones, which will include a careful assessment of data health and any repair of storage if necessary.”
Amazon has also confirmed that the AWS Management Console and command line interface (CLI) were disrupted by the failure of two Availability Zones.
Availability Zones are groups of data centers with independent power and connectivity located in the same geographical region to provide backup resources in case of a failure.
Amazon said around 10 services such as Amazon EC2, S3, AWS Lambda, AWS Management Console and CLI have been “disrupted” by the fire and failure of the two Availability Zones.
In addition, about 20 AWS services are still “degraded” in the region including DynamoDB and Elastic Load balancing, while another 50 services are still “impacted.”
At around 7:30 a.m. ET Monday, AWS said it was seeing “significant signs of recovery” for some systems, but power was still down at the center.
“We do not have an ETA for power restoration at this time,” the company said.
“We continue to work towards recovery across all services, and we will provide an update by 6:00 AM PST on March 2, or sooner if we have additional information to share,” Amazon said.
