AWS Middle East fire halts Claude and ChatGPT services as Bitcoin nears $68,500

On March 1, 2026, a fire triggered by external impacts at an Amazon Web Services data center in the Middle East led to a full power shutdown in ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1, disrupting services such as Claude, ChatGPT and AWS Bedrock. AWS reports that restoration will take many hours as teams await fire department clearance and assess potential storage damage, while investors react to regional military tensions with higher oil and gold prices and renewed gains in major cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.