A data centre in the United Arab Emirates lost power after catching fire on Sunday, potentially as a result of Iranian airstrikes in Dubai, causing service disruptions for Amazon’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), in one of its “Availability Zones” in the country.
- A data centre in the United Arab Emirates lost power after catching fire on Sunday, potentially as a result of...
- PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire.” The...
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, such as EC2 Instances, DB Instances, EBS Volumes, and other resources, were unavailable on Sunday...
- AWS stated that it was making every effort to minimise service interruptions for clients whose workloads were limited to mec1-az2.
Keep reading for the full breakdown on Amazon Web Services — everything you need to know is covered below.
AWS said, “At around 4:30 a.m. PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire.”
The company’s website states that an “Availability Zone” consists of one or more physically connected data centres. Within each AWS Region, these zones are distinct, remote areas.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, such as EC2 Instances, DB Instances, EBS Volumes, and other resources, were unavailable on Sunday due to a “localised power issue” in the mec1-az2 Availability Zone in AWS’ ME-Central-1 Region, according to posts on the AWS health dashboard.
The mec1-az2 zone was “impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire,” according to a later statement from AWS. The fire department had turned off the facility’s power and generators while they put out the fire.
AWS’s effort to minimise service disruptions
According to AWS, clients running their apps redundantly across the region’s two other Availability Zones were unaffected. AWS stated that it was making every effort to minimise service interruptions for clients whose workloads were limited to mec1-az2.
When authorities deemed it safe, AWS promised to restore power to MEC1-AZ2. The power had not yet been restored as of press time.
The items that had hit the data centre were not mentioned in the AWS posts. But in reaction to the US and Israel bombing Tehran on Saturday, which killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking officials, Iran’s military launched missile and drone attacks on Dubai on Saturday and Sunday. Iran also attacked Doha, Qatar, and Manama, Bahrain.
Following the US-Israel attacks on Saturday, the Iranian government reinstated a complete internet blackout, according to Netblocks, which stated on Monday that the nation is still offline.
Iranian security forces reportedly killed thousands of protesters during the nationwide anti-government demonstrations last month, when the government shut down its internet for 22 days.