Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) data centre in the UAE reported an interruption in services from 1 March, after debris from an aerial interception struck the facility and started a fire.

The company said on their health dashboard at 5:19pm UAE time on 1 Marh that connectivity and power issues had affected APIs and instances in a single Availability Zone (mec1-az2) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region due to a power issue.

According to a report, in an update at 9:41pm UAE time, they then said, “At around 4:30am PST (4:30pm UAE time), one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire.”

“We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally,” AWS explained.

In their next update, AWS said, “We are aware that some customers are experiencing errors when calling EC2 APIs, specifically networking related APIs (AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces). We are actively working on multiple paths to mitigate these issues.”

At 6:01am UAE time on 2 March, the company said, “For customers that can, we recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where applicable.”

Their 2 March 9:59am UAE time update then stated, “We are investigating additional connectivity issues and error rates in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region.”