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

A wave of outages swept the United Arab Emirates this week after drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services infrastructure in the region, knocking major apps, banks and fintech platforms offline and underscoring how much of the Gulf’s digital economy runs through a handful of cloud facilities. AWS said late Monday that two of its data centers in the UAE and a nearby facility in Bahrain sustained damage, forcing parts of its infrastructure offline and triggering disruptions across consumer apps, payments firms and banking providers on March 3, 2026.

"We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams," AWS wrote in a Mar. 3 status update. "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."

Context and details

The incident followed a sharp escalation in regional tensions after U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend — actions the source said killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — and subsequent retaliatory attacks by Tehran. AWS posted on its health dashboard that the situation remained "ongoing" and advised customers to migrate workloads to alternate Regions where possible.

• Companies reporting problems included ride-hailing and delivery platform Careem; payments firms Alaan and Hubpay; banks ADCB and Emirates NBD; enterprise software provider Snowflake; and investing app Sarwa.
• 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 warned customers that "Elevated connectivity issues and error rates within the region will continue until the power issue has been resolved," in its incident update.
• Careem confirmed full restoration, with cofounder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha saying in a LinkedIn post that the company’s services were "operating normally again."

AWS provided rare public details about physical damage. The company said "objects" hit one of its UAE data centers on Sunday, causing "sparks and fire," and that "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." The strikes, AWS added, also affected a facility in Bahrain when a drone strike in close proximity caused physical impacts.

On the technical front, AWS said newly written S3 objects could be retrieved while GET error rates for pre-existing data remained dependent on restoring damaged infrastructure. The company also reported that Amazon DynamoDB error rates remained elevated, and that dependent services — including AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon RDS — would follow as foundational services recovered. "Amazon EC2 instance launches remain throttled in the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region and will be relaxed as foundational service recovery and capacity allow," the update said.

Outlook

AWS said it expected improvements "over the coming hours" for DynamoDB and other services as recovery efforts continue, but warned the disruption was active and advised migrations to alternate Regions. Beyond immediate customer impacts, the strikes reverberated through energy and financial markets: Iran’s reported closure of the Strait of Hormuz pushed oil prices higher and sent U.S., European and Asian equities lower in early trading. For companies built heavily on a single cloud region, the episode is a stark reminder that physical risks to digital infrastructure can quickly cascade into broad economic disruption.