02 March 2026
John Tanner
Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced service disruptions in one of its Availability Zones in the United Arab Emirates after a data centre in Dubai caught fire, reportedly amid ongoing Iranian air strikes.
According to updates posted on the AWS Health Dashboard, the mec1-az2 Availability Zone within the ME-Central-1 Region encountered a “localized power issue” on Sunday. The outage disrupted access to key Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services, including EC2 instances, database instances, and EBS volumes.
AWS later confirmed that the affected facility had been “impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire.” Emergency responders shut off power to the facility and its backup generators while extinguishing the blaze.
The company stated that its two other Availability Zones in the UAE region remained fully operational. Customers running workloads across multiple zones were largely unaffected. However, organisations with infrastructure concentrated solely in mec1-az2 experienced service interruptions. AWS said it is working to restore operations as soon as authorities deem the site safe.
As of publication, power had not yet been restored to the impacted zone.
While AWS did not specify the nature of the objects that struck the facility, the incident occurred during a period of heightened regional tension. Iran’s military launched missile and drone attacks targeting Dubai over the weekend, following US and Israeli air strikes in Tehran that reportedly killed senior Iranian leadership figures. Strikes were also reported in Manama, Bahrain, and Doha, Qatar.
In parallel developments, internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported that Iran reinstated a nationwide internet blackout after the US-Israel strikes. The country remains largely offline. This follows a 22-day internet shutdown last month during widespread anti-government protests, which resulted in significant reported casualties.
