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Amazon me-central-1 (UAE)¶
Amazon me-central-1 is Amazon Web Services' Middle East
(UAE) cloud region, launched 2022-08-30 in the United Arab
Emirates. It sits in the me- regional family alongside
me-south-1 (Bahrain) as AWS's
primary Middle-East presence.
As of Q1 2026, me-central-1 is also the canonical wiki instance of a cloud region directly targeted by kinetic attack — two of its UAE data-center facilities were "directly struck" by drones on March 1-2, 2026.
Facility profile (pre-incident)¶
- Region code:
me-central-1 - Country: United Arab Emirates
- Parent region family:
me-(Middle East) - Sibling region: systems/amazon-me-south-1 (Bahrain)
- Launched: 2022-08-30
The region is part of AWS's global AZ + region topology — customers provision workloads in me-central-1 primarily for data-residency in the UAE, low-latency service to UAE + wider Gulf users, and as a Middle-East failover option for workloads whose primary region is in Europe, Asia, or the Americas.
2026-03-01 drone strike incident¶
On the morning of March 1, 2026 (UTC), Amazon reported "a fire after objects hit a UAE data center." The next day Amazon confirmed that two of its facilities in the United Arab Emirates (me-central-1 region) were "directly struck" by drones tied to the ongoing regional conflict.
Impact per the AWS Health Dashboard:
"These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage."
Third-party observability from Cloudflare Cloud Observatory confirmed:
- Elevated connection failure rates on the region's Cloud Observatory page (radar.cloudflare.com/cloud-observatory/amazon/me-central-1) "beginning March 1-2 and remaining higher for multiple days."
Amazon warned customers that regional instability was likely to continue, making operations "unpredictable," and urged customers with workloads in the affected regions "to back up their data or migrate to other AWS regions" — see patterns/cloud-region-migration-during-conflict for the operational response pattern.
Why the incident matters for AWS region threat modelling¶
The me-central-1 event is the first publicly disclosed kinetic strike on a hyperscaler cloud region in the sysdesign-wiki corpus. Implications:
- Region-level blast radius becomes a physical envelope. Multiple data-center facilities clustered in a single geography are not independent against kinetic threats the way they are against correlated power or fibre failures.
- The provider's recommended response is migration, not ride-through. AWS's guidance is to move data and workloads to non-conflict regions, confirming the severity of the disruption.
- Pre-positioned multi-region architecture becomes a geopolitical hedge, not just a reliability best-practice.
See concepts/kinetic-attack-on-cloud-infrastructure for the full threat-model discussion.
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-04-28-cloudflare-q1-2026-internet-disruption-summary — canonical wiki instance. me-central-1 received direct drone strikes on two facilities on 2026-03-01, with Cloudflare Cloud Observatory showing elevated connection failure rates into early March. AWS issued an explicit customer-migration advisory on the Health Dashboard.