Dubai, March 2, 2026 : Amazon Web Services (AWS) confirmed that one of its data centre facilities in the UAE was impacted by a fire early Sunday morning, causing a localized power outage in a single Availability Zone within the ME-CENTRAL-1 region.
According to AWS, at approximately 4:30 AM PST, objects struck the facility, leading to sparks and a fire. The UAE fire department subsequently cut power to the building and generators while working to extinguish the blaze. As a result, the impacted zone, identified as mec1-az2, went offline.
AWS stated that it is still awaiting permission to restore power and that full connectivity recovery could take several hours.
Services Disrupted
The AWS Health Dashboard indicated “Increased Error Rates” in the ME-CENTRAL-1 region, with multiple services affected, including:
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
- Elastic Block Store (EBS)
- Networking-related APIs
Customers experienced failures in APIs such as AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, and DescribeNetworkInterfaces.
AWS advised customers to use alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where possible. The company confirmed that other zones within the UAE region remain fully operational.
Applications running redundantly across multiple Availability Zones were reportedly not impacted.
Recovery Efforts Ongoing
AWS said it has been actively rerouting traffic away from the affected zone and deploying configuration changes to mitigate networking issues. While some API functionality has shown signs of recovery, the company has not provided a specific timeline for full power restoration.
Customers requiring immediate recovery have been advised to restore from backups, EBS snapshots, or launch replacement resources in unaffected zones.
Link to Regional Tensions Not Confirmed
The incident occurred amid escalating regional tensions following recent missile and drone strikes across the Gulf. When asked whether the data centre disruption was linked to the broader security situation, AWS neither confirmed nor denied any connection.
Authorities have not officially linked the fire to the ongoing regional conflict.
Impact on Businesses
The outage has affected enterprises relying on the UAE-based AWS region for hosting cloud infrastructure, applications, and databases. Experts note that the incident underscores the importance of multi-zone redundancy and disaster recovery planning for mission-critical workloads.
Further updates are expected as AWS continues restoration efforts.
