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Amazon data centre in UAE confirms fire incident, services impacted
Amazon Web Services informed on their health dashboard on Sunday evening that it will take several hours to restore connectivity in the affected zone
- PUBLISHED: Mon 2 Mar 2026, 11:06 AM
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An Amazon Web Services data center in the UAE reported a disruption in their services on Sunday night after objects struck the facility, triggering sparks and a fire.
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The company said on their health dashboard at 5:19 am PST (5:19pm UAE time) on March 1 that connectivity and power issues had affected APIs and instances in a single Availability Zone (mec1-az2) in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region due to a localized power issue.
In an update at 9:41am PST (9:41pm UAE time), they said, "At around 4:30am PST (4:30pm UAE time), one of our Availability Zones (mec1-az2) was impacted by objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire. The fire department shut off power to the facility and generators as they worked to put out the fire."
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"We are still awaiting permission to turn the power back on, and once we have, we will ensure we restore power and connectivity safely. It will take several hours to restore connectivity to the impacted AZ. The other AZs in the region are functioning normally," they added.
In their next update, AWS informed, "We are aware that some customers are experiencing errors when calling EC2 APIs, specifically networking related APIs (AllocateAddress, AssociateAddress, DescribeRouteTable, DescribeNetworkInterfaces). We are actively working on multiple paths to mitigate these issues."
At 6:01pm PST (6:01am UAE time on March 2), the company said they still did not have an ETA for power restoration. "For customers that can, we recommend using alternate Availability Zones or other AWS Regions where applicable," they said.
Their March 1 9:59pm PST (March 2 9:59am UAE time) update read, "We are investigating additional connectivity issues and error rates in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region."
