Drone strikes hit Amazon’s AWS data centers in UAE, trigger widespread app and banking outages

A wave of outages swept across the United Arab Emirates this week after drone strikes damaged key Amazon Web Services infrastructure, knocking major apps, banks, and fintech platforms offline and exposing how tightly the region’s digital economy is tied to the cloud.

AWS said late Monday that two of its data centers in the UAE and a nearby facility in Bahrain sustained damage in the attacks, forcing parts of its infrastructure offline and triggering service disruptions across multiple industries.

Consumer-facing apps were among the first to feel the impact. Ride-hailing and delivery platform Careem reported issues, alongside payments firms Alaan and Hubpay. Banking providers, including ADCB and Emirates NBD, flagged service problems, and enterprise software company Snowflake warned customers about elevated error rates linked to the incident.

“Apps and digital services in the United Arab Emirates are reporting outages following drone strikes on Amazon Web Services’ data centers in the country,” CNBC reported.

From Clouds to Chaos: Drone Strikes Take AWS Facilities Offline in UAE

The outages follow a sharp escalation in regional tensions. The United States and Israel carried out joint strikes on Iran over the weekend that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, setting off retaliatory attacks by Tehran across the region. Military bases and critical infrastructure sites have since been targeted.

AWS said the situation remained active. The company posted on its health dashboard Tuesday morning that the disruption was “ongoing.”

The latest disruption came just a day after another AWS incident affected the same region. At the time, the company disclosed that an earlier outage stemmed from a data center fire triggered by “objects,” which impaired multiple Availability Zones in its Middle East infrastructure.

In a status update, AWS wrote:

“Increased Error Rates
Mar 03 8:14 AM PST We are providing an update on the ongoing service disruptions affecting the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region (ME-CENTRAL-1). We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams.

For Amazon S3, we are seeing continued improvement in PUT and LIST availability. Newly written objects are now able to be successfully retrieved, and we continue to work on reducing GET error rates for objects written prior to the event. Full recovery of GET operations for pre-existing data remains dependent on restoring the affected infrastructure. For Amazon DynamoDB, error rates remain elevated and our teams continue to focus on recovery; we expect to see improvement over the coming hours. As these foundational services recover, dependent services — including AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon RDS — will follow. Amazon EC2 instance launches remain throttled in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region and will be relaxed as foundational service recovery and capacity allow. The AWS Management Console is operational, though customers may continue to experience errors on certain pages as underlying services work through their recovery.”

“We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams,” AWS wrote 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.”

Middle East Tech Disrupted After Drone Strikes Target AWS Infrastructure

Service providers across the UAE moved to update customers in real time. Alaan said its mobile and web apps were offline following a “critical AWS outage caused by the ongoing regional situation,” according to a notice posted on its site earlier in the day. The message was later removed.

ADCB told customers on X that “Due to a recent region-wide IT disruption, the ADCB Mobile Banking App and Contact Centre services are temporarily unavailable.” Emirates NBD reported phone banking disruptions on Monday but said services were functioning again by Tuesday.

Snowflake reported that “Elevated connectivity issues and error rates within the region will continue until the power issue has been resolved,” according to its latest incident update.

Other platforms began to recover. Investing app Sarwa said core services were back online Tuesday after earlier disruptions. Hubpay warned users they might face login problems during the incident window. Careem later confirmed full restoration, with cofounder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha saying in a LinkedIn post Tuesday that the company’s services were operating normally again.

AWS provided rare details about the physical impact of the strikes. The company said “objects” hit one of its UAE data centers on Sunday, causing “sparks and fire.”

“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.

“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.”

Local operators are working to restore full service, yet the shockwaves have spread far beyond the region’s tech stack. Iran’s move to close the Strait of Hormuz rattled global energy markets, pushing oil prices higher and sending U.S., European, and Asian equities lower in early trading Tuesday.

For companies that built heavily on a single cloud region, the incident serves as a stark reminder: physical risks to digital infrastructure are no longer theoretical.