Digital services in UAE suspended after data center drone attack

Apps and digital services in the United Arab Emirates are reporting outages after drone strikes Amazon Web Services’ data centers in the country.

AWS said late Monday that two of its data centers in the UAE and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes, taking the facilities offline.

Consumer apps and payments companies Alaan and Hubpay, including delivery and taxi platform Careem, have reported outages as a result of issues with AWS infrastructure in the country.

Banking providers including ADCB and Emirates NBD, along with enterprise software providers SnowflakeAlso reported service disruptions.

The US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran over the weekend, killing the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and prompting waves of attacks from Tehran across the region.

Military bases and critical infrastructure, including data centers and oil and gas production facilities, have been targeted.

The AWS Health Dashboard most recently reported this disruption as “ongoing.”

“We continue to make progress on recovery efforts across multiple workstreams,” the company posted at 8:14 a.m. PST on Tuesday. “We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternative AWS regions.”

As of 10:38 a.m. ET, the company said on its website that Alan’s mobile and web apps were offline due to a “critical AWS outage caused by the prevailing regional situation.” The message was removed as of 11:23 am ET.

“Due to the recent region-wide IT disruption, the ADCB mobile banking application and contact center services are temporarily unavailable,” ADCB said in a post on Twitter on Monday. Emirates NBD said its phone banking services were affected on Monday, although services were operational on Tuesday.

“Elevated connectivity issues and error rates will continue within the region until the power issue is resolved,” Snowflake posted in an incident report Monday, its latest update.

Investment app Serva said it was experiencing service disruptions 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 when disruptions continue even on Monday.

Karim’s services are now fully operational, cofounder and CEO Mudasir Sheikha said in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday.

The drone attacks happened on Sunday, when “objects” struck one of AWS’s data centers, creating “sparks and fire,” the company said that day.

“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly hit, while in Bahrain, a drone strike near one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure,” AWS said Monday.

“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required firefighting activities resulting in additional water damage.”

As local operators race to restore services in the UAE, market ripples are being felt around the world.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran sent shock waves throughout the global energy market. US stocks opened sharply lower on Tuesday morning, while European stocks and Asian markets also fell. Oil prices continue to rise in anticipation of an energy supply shock.