Amazon Web Services Reports Power Shutdown at UAE Data Centre

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its data centre located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) faced a power shutdown on March 1, 2026, following objects impacting the facility, which resulted in a fire. AWS’s Health Dashboard indicated that this incident took place in the Availability Zone mec1-az2, part of the AWS cloud region known as me-central-1.

Incident Details

According to information available on the company’s website, around 4:30 AM PST, objects struck the data centre’s Availability Zone (mec1-az2), causing sparks and igniting a fire. This particular Availability Zone is designed to operate independently for enhanced reliability and backup.

Emergency Response

The website further clarified that the fire department took action by switching off power to the facility and its generators while they worked to extinguish the fire. The restoration of connectivity to the impacted Availability Zone is expected to take several hours, although other Availability Zones in the region are reportedly operating without issues.

Amazon’s Update and Recommendations

As of this moment, Amazon has not confirmed a connection between the fire and the impacts from the strikes. However, the company has provided an update indicating that it is pursuing multiple solutions to manage the outage and has urged customers to relocate their workloads to alternative Availability Zones or different AWS regions to minimise disruption.

Operational Status of Other Data Centres

Additionally, AWS has verified that the other data centres situated in the UAE region continue to function without interruptions.

Architectural Resilience of AWS Availability Zones

AWS Availability Zones are typically composed of one or more large-scale data centre clusters, each equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking systems. The architecture is designed for multi-zone resilience, allowing customers with appropriately distributed workloads to automatically transition operations to another zone within the same region.

Context of the Incident

This event comes amidst Iran’s retaliatory missile and drone strikes in reaction to US and Israeli actions targeting Iran. However, Amazon has not yet connected the fire incident to the rising tensions in the region.