Foreign workers stare into the sky as black smoke rises after an explosion in the Fujairah industrial area on March 3, 2026.
Fadel Senna | AFP | Getty Images
Apps and digital services in the United Arab Emirates are reporting outages following drone attacks. Amazon Web Services Domestic data center.
AWS announced late Monday that two of its data centers in the UAE and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone attacks and the facilities were shut down.
Consumer apps including delivery and taxi platform Careem, as well as payments companies Alaan and Hubpay, reported outages as a result of issues with AWS infrastructure in the country.
Banking providers such as ADCB and Emirates NBD and enterprise software providers such as: snowflakeservice failures have also been reported.
The United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran over the weekend, killing the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and sparking a wave of Iranian attacks across the region.
Critical infrastructure such as military bases, data centers, and oil and gas production facilities are also being targeted.
Stopping the app
AWS Health Dashboard recently reported that the disruption is “ongoing.”
“We continue to advance recovery efforts across multiple workstreams,” the company posted Tuesday at 8:14 a.m. PT. “We continue to strongly encourage customers running workloads in the Middle East to take action now to migrate those workloads to alternative AWS Regions.”
The company announced on its website as of 10:38 a.m. ET that Alaan’s mobile and web apps were taken offline due to “significant AWS disruptions due to ongoing local conditions.” This message was deleted at 11:23 a.m. ET.
“Due to recent region-wide IT disruptions, ADCB mobile banking app and contact center services are temporarily unavailable,” ADCB said in a post on Twitter on Monday. Emirates NBD also announced that its phone banking service was working on Tuesday but was affected on Monday.
“Connectivity issues and elevated error rates in the region will continue until the power issue is resolved,” Snowflake posted in its latest update on the incident report on Monday.
Investment app Salwa announced on Monday that it was experiencing service interruptions due to an issue with AWS, but reported on Tuesday that its core services were back online. Hubpay said customers may experience problems logging into the app as disruption continued on Monday.
Careem’s services are now fully operational, co-founder and CEO Mudasir Sheikha said in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.
“Sparks and Fire”
The drone attack occurred on Sunday, when an “object” struck one of AWS’s data centers, causing “sparks and fire,” the company said on the same day.
“Two of our facilities were directly hit in the UAE, and a drone attack in close proximity to one of our facilities in Bahrain physically impacted our infrastructure,” AWS said on Monday.
“These attacks caused damage to structures, disrupted power supplies to infrastructure, required firefighting operations in some cases, and caused further flooding.”
While local carriers are scrambling to restore service in the UAE, the market ripples are being felt around the world.
Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz shocked global energy markets. U.S. stocks opened sharply lower on Tuesday morning, while European and Asian markets also fell. Oil prices continue to rise as the prospect of an energy supply shock increases.
