Foreign workers look at a tall plume of black smoke ascends following an explosion in the Fujairah industrial zone on March 3, 2026.
Fadel Senna | Afp | Getty Images
Apps and digital services in the United Arab Emirates are reporting outages following drone strikes on Amazon Web Services’ data centers in the country.
AWS said late Monday that two of its data centers in the UAE and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, taking the facilities offline.
Consumer apps, including delivery and taxi platform Careem, and payments companies Alaan and Hubpay reported outages as a result of issues with AWS infrastructure in the country.
Banking providers, including ADCB and Emirates NBD, alongside enterprise software providers like Snowflake, have also reported service disruptions.
The U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran over weekend, killing the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and prompting waves of attacks by Tehran across the region.
Military bases and critical infrastructure, including data centers and oil and gas production facilities, have also been targeted.
App outages
The AWS Health Dashboard most recently reported that the disruption was “ongoing.”
“We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams,” the company posted on Tuesday at 8:14 a.m. PST. “We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions.”
Alaan’s mobile and web apps were offline due to a “critical AWS outage caused by the ongoing regional situation,” the company said on its website as of 10:38 a.m. ET. The message was removed as of 11:23 am ET.
“Due to a recent region-wide IT disruption, the ADCB Mobile Banking App and Contact Centre services are temporarily unavailable,” ADCB said in a post on Twitter on Monday. Emirates NBD also said its phone banking services were impacted on Monday, though services were functional on Tuesday.
“Elevated connectivity issues and error rates within the region will continue until the power issue has been resolved,” Snowflake posted on an incident report on Monday, its most recent update.
Investing app Sarwa said it was experiencing service disruptions due to AWS issues on Monday, before reporting that its core services were back online on Tuesday. Hubpay said that customers may experience issues logging into the app while disruptions continued on Monday.
Careem’s services are now fully operational, cofounder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha said in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
‘Sparks and fire’
The drone strikes occurred on Sunday, with “objects” striking one of AWS’ data centers, creating “sparks and fire”, the company said that day.
“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” AWS said on Monday.
“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”
While local operators have raced to restore services in the UAE, market ripples are being felt across the globe.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran sent shockwaves across global energy markets. U.S stocks opened sharply lower Tuesday morning, while European stocks and Asian markets also fell. Oil prices have continued to rise as prospects of an energy supply shock mount.