Digital services down in UAE after data center drone strikes
Foreign workers look at the towering cloud of black smoke following an explosion in a Fujairah industrial zone on March 3, 2026.
Fadil Senna | Afp | Getty Images
Apps and digital services in United Arab Emirates report outages after drone strikes ‘Amazon Web Services’ Data centers in the country.
AWS said in a statement late Monday that two data centers in the UAE and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks and the facilities were offline.
Consumer apps, including delivery and taxi platform Careem, as well as payments companies Alaan and Hubpay, have reported outages as a result of issues with AWS infrastructure in the country.
Banking providers, including ADCB and Emirates NBD, as well as enterprise software providers Snowflakethey also reported service disruptions.
The United States and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran over the weekend, killing the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and sparking waves of attacks by Tehran across the region.
Critical infrastructures, including military bases and data centers, as well as oil and gas production facilities, were also targeted.
Application interruptions
AWS Health Dashboard reported that the latest outage was “ongoing.”
“We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workflows,” the company said at 8:14 a.m. PST on Tuesday. “We continue to strongly recommend that our customers running workloads in the Middle East take immediate action to move those workloads to alternative AWS Regions.”
As of 10:38 a.m. ET, Alaan’s mobile and web applications were offline due to a “critical AWS outage resulting from an ongoing regional situation,” the company’s website said. The message was removed as of 11:23 a.m. ET.
“Due to the recent region-wide IT outage, ADCB Mobile Banking App and Contact Center services are temporarily unavailable,” ADCB said in a post on Twitter on Monday. he said. Emirates NBD also said telephone banking services were affected on Monday, but the services were functional on Tuesday.
“Increased connectivity issues and error rates in the region will continue until the power issue is resolved,” Snowflake said in an incident report, its latest update, on Monday.
Investment app Sarwa said it experienced service outages due to AWS issues on Monday, before reporting that its core services were back online on Tuesday. Hubpay said customers may experience problems logging into the app as the outages continue on Monday.
Careem’s services are now fully operational, co-founder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha said in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
‘Spark and fire’
The drone strikes occurred on Sunday and the “objects” crashed into one of AWS’s data centers, creating “sparks and fire,” the company said in a statement that day.
“Two of our facilities were directly hit in the UAE, while a drone strike near one of our facilities in Bahrain caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” AWS said in a statement on Monday. he said.
“These attacks caused structural damage, disrupted the distribution of electricity to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”
Market fluctuations are being felt globally as local operators race to restore services in the UAE.
