Dubai is one of many countries that has active internet filtering so you may be seeing a side effect of that even if there is no specific reason for the Dubai authorities to block the traffic to\from your target system. I've no idea how their internet controls work but it is quite likely that the decision making part of the stack adds significant latency to traffic that is uncommon (which yours will be) while it checks whether it has been banned or not. If the system is under load it's probable that traffic will get dropped even if it is not explicitly banned, otherwise DOS attacks on the filtering stack could be used to bypass them. High traffic sites are likely to have their approval states cached and the latency introduced by the filtering stack will be less noticeable (unless the target address\port\protocol is banned of course).
There are many other possible technical reasons so take this as a possibility, not a definitive answer.