Amazon Web Services reports fire at UAE data centre

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on March 1, 2026, reported that its data centre in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) experienced a power shutdown after objects struck the facility, triggering a fire. AWS’s Health Dashboard stated that the incident was reported at the Availability Zone mec1-az2 within AWS’s cloud region dubbed me-central-1.

“At around 4:30 AM PST, one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data centre, creating sparks and fire,” the company website said. This Availability Zone is reportedly kept independent for reliability and backup. 

The website further added that, “The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire,” and that “It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally.”

As of now, Amazon has not confirmed if the fire at the data centre was connected to the strikes. However, the company provided an update saying that it is working on several parallel solutions to address the outage and urged customers to shift their workloads to alternate Availability Zones or other AWS regions to minimise disruption.

In addition, AWS also confirmed that the other data centres in the UAE region continue to function normally.

AWS Availability Zones typically consist of one or more large-scale data centre clusters, each consisting of independent power, cooling, and networking. Since its architecture is built for multi-zone resilience, customers running properly distributed workloads can automatically switch operations to another zone in the same region.

The news comes at a time when Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone strikes in response to US and Israeli attacks on Iran. However, Amazon has not yet linked the fire to the escalating tension.