Dubai and the wider UAE are experiencing widespread digital disruptions after Iranian missile and drone strikes physically damaged Amazon Web Services data centers in the country over the weekend, taking down banking platforms, food delivery apps, and e-commerce services used by millions of residents across the Gulf.
The strikes hit facilities in AWS’s ME-CENTRAL-1 region beginning March 1, causing structural damage, power outages, fires, and water damage from suppression systems. Two of the region’s three availability zones, mec1-az2 and mec1-az3, remain heavily impaired as of late Monday, with recovery expected to take several days or longer. A third zone, mec1-az1, is functioning, but cross-zone dependencies are producing ripple effects across services that were not directly hit.
AWS has confirmed the incident is geopolitical in nature and not a technical failure, advising all customers in the region to reroute workloads to alternative availability zones or regions where possible. The company has not provided a firm timeline for full restoration.
What is Down
The most significant confirmed casualty is ADCB, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank. The bank’s entire digital banking ecosystem, including its mobile app, internet banking portal, and payment services, went offline due to the AWS disruption. Customers are currently unable to log in, transfer money, or use card services online. ADCB has confirmed the outage is directly linked to the regional AWS issues and has directed customers to physical branches for urgent transactions.
Among the consumer platforms, Talabat is experiencing severe failures in order tracking, delivery updates, and rider allocation. Noon is reporting app loading problems, checkout failures, and broken delivery tracking across thousands of user accounts. Careem‘s food delivery service is showing long wait times, app crashes, and payment failures, while Deliveroo has logged similar delays in order processing and live tracking. Careem’s core ride-hailing function is partially operational for some users.
Hundreds of smaller UAE-based fintech applications, e-commerce platforms, and government portals hosted on AWS ME-CENTRAL-1 are returning 5xx server errors, timeouts, or severely degraded performance. General web traffic for sites relying heavily on AWS S3 and EC2 in the UAE region is unstable across multiple internet service providers.
What is Still Working
Services with proper multi-region redundancy or those built on alternative cloud infrastructure remain unaffected. WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and all Google and Microsoft services are operating normally.
Banking apps from Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, and Mashreq have reported minimal or no disruption, a reflection of their distributed infrastructure built across multiple cloud providers and regions.
What Changed This Time
Unlike routine AWS outages caused by software failures or misconfigured deployments, this disruption stems from direct physical damage to the underlying hardware and building infrastructure. AWS’s own guidance acknowledges that standard failover procedures do not apply when the physical facility itself is compromised.
The AWS ME-CENTRAL-1 region, launched in 2022 and marketed as a stable gateway for Gulf cloud adoption, had attracted significant deployments from financial institutions, government entities, and regional enterprises that are now discovering the limits of availability zone redundancy when the threat is not a server failure but a missile.
Residents experiencing app failures are advised to try mobile data connections instead of Wi-Fi, as some ISP routing within the UAE is also affected. Individual app status pages and outage monitoring platforms are publishing real-time updates. For critical banking or payment needs, physical branch visits remain the most reliable option until digital services are restored.
AWS customers operating in the region should monitor the official AWS Health Dashboard for zone-by-zone recovery updates as they are published.
