Amazon UAE data centre catches fire amid Iranian air strikes

Details: John Tanner; Category: Data Centres & Networks; 02 March 2026; 10296 views

Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced service disruptions in one of its Availability Zones in the UAE on Sunday when a data centre lost power after catching fire, possibly due to Iranian air strikes in Dubai.

According to posts on the AWS health dashboard, the mec1-az2 Availability Zone in AWS’ ME-Central-1 Region experienced a “localized power issue” on Sunday that knocked out access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud services, including EC2 Instances, DB Instances, EBS Volumes, and others resources.

AWS later said the mec1-az2 zone was “impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire”, and that the fire department had shut off power to the facility and generators as they put out the fire.

AWS said that its two other Availability Zones in the region were working normally, and that customers running their applications redundantly across the zones were unaffected. For customers with workloads only in mec1-az2, AWS said it was working to mitigate service disruptions as quickly as possible.

AWS said it would switch mec1-az2’s power back on when authorities said it was safe to do so As we went to press, power had not yet been restored.

AWS posts didn’t specify what objects had struck the data centre. However, the incident happened as Iran’s military launched missile and drone attacks on Dubai on Saturday and Sunday in response to the US and Israel bombing Tehran on Saturday, killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top officials. Iran also launched strikes on Manama, Bahrain and Doha, Qatar.

Meanwhile, the Iranian government reinstated a total internet blackout after the US-Israel attacks on Saturday, according to Netblocks, which said on Monday that the country remains offline.

Last month, the government switched off its internet for 22 days during massive anti-government protests across the country, during which thousands of protesters were reportedly killed by Iranian security forces.