Service disruption: Increased Error Rates - AWS Outage

Summary

We want to provide some additional information on the power issue in a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, 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 safe

Impact

We want to provide some additional information on the power issue in a single Availability Zone in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region. At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, 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 safe

Lessons Learned

⚠AWS has experienced 5 incidents in the past year. Consider monitoring their status page for recurring patterns.

📊Incidents related to network, compute, storage, database, api, authentication, deployment, configuration, capacity, routing have occurred 261 times across all providers in the past year. This is one of the most common failure categories in cloud infrastructure.

💡This incident is categorized as: Configuration Error, Database Overload, Network / Routing, Capacity Issue, Deployment Failure, Authentication Issue, Storage Failure, API Issue. Consider implementing preventive measures specific to this failure category.