Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud computing provider, is not down globally as of Tuesday evening in Seoul, but targeted operational issues continue to affect services in the Middle East, according to the company's official Health Dashboard and third-party monitoring sites.

The AWS Health Dashboard, the authoritative source for service status, shows no widespread disruptions across major regions like the United States, Europe or Asia Pacific. Most AWS services remain fully operational worldwide. However, the Middle East (UAE) Region, known as ME-CENTRAL-1, and the Bahrain Region (ME-SOUTH-1) are experiencing significant degraded performance and disruptions stemming from incidents that began earlier this month.

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In ME-CENTRAL-1, multiple services are listed as disrupted or degraded, including Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon CloudWatch. AWS reports that two Availability Zones (mec1-az2 and mec1-az3) suffered physical damage from drone strikes, leading to power loss and infrastructure impairment. Recovery efforts are progressing, with improvements noted in S3 PUT and LIST operations, though GET error rates remain elevated and EC2 instance launches are throttled. The AWS Management Console is accessible but may display errors for affected resources.

AWS has advised customers to migrate workloads to unaffected regions, such as those in the US, Europe or Asia Pacific, to minimize impact. Updates indicate ongoing workstreams for full restoration, but no firm timeline has been provided for complete recovery. The latest dashboard refresh, occurring minutes ago, confirms recovery is advancing but dependent on physical infrastructure repairs.

Similarly, in ME-SOUTH-1, power restoration in one impaired Availability Zone (mes1-az2) is underway, with expected delays of at least a day in some cases. Services like AWS Client VPN, Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS show impacts, though some components have partially recovered.

User-reported issues on platforms like Downdetector show scattered complaints in the past 24 hours, concentrated in regions like us-east-1 and ca-central-1, but these appear limited and not indicative of a broad outage. Status monitoring services such as StatusGator describe the situation as a partial or minor outage, primarily confined to the affected Middle East areas with over 140 components impacted in those locales, while global operations remain stable.

The incidents in the Middle East mark a continuation of challenges that began around March 1-3, 2026, when AWS first reported elevated error rates and connectivity problems tied to external physical events. Unlike previous high-profile AWS outages—such as the October 2025 global DNS resolution failure in us-east-1 that cascaded to affect sites like Snapchat, Roblox, Fortnite and even Amazon's own retail platform—the current issues are regionally isolated.

That 2025 event highlighted vulnerabilities in centralized infrastructure dependencies, knocking offline thousands of websites and apps reliant on AWS for hosting, storage and compute. In contrast, the present disruptions have not triggered similar widespread ripple effects, underscoring AWS's regional architecture designed to contain failures.

Amazon has not issued public statements beyond the dashboard updates on the Middle East events. For account-specific impacts, customers are directed to the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, which provides tailored notifications via Amazon EventBridge for those with resources in the affected regions.

Cloud experts note that while AWS maintains high availability through multi-Availability Zone and multi-region redundancy, rare external factors like geopolitical incidents can still cause localized outages. Businesses are encouraged to implement cross-region replication and failover strategies to enhance resilience.

Downdetector data indicates no surge in global reports as of March 18, 2026, evening KST, with most feedback centering on historical or unrelated queries rather than active widespread problems. Independent checks confirm core AWS endpoints, including the management console and major services in primary regions, respond normally.

For developers, enterprises and individuals relying on AWS, the takeaway remains clear: While the platform is not "down" in the conventional sense of a full blackout, vigilance is warranted for those with exposure in the Middle East regions. AWS continues to provide hourly or more frequent updates on the dashboard for transparency.

The events serve as a reminder of the cloud's strengths in scalability and redundancy, balanced against occasional risks from real-world disruptions. As recovery progresses in the UAE and Bahrain areas, global AWS users can expect continued normal operations.