Arab State Paralysed, Mobile Banking and Online Taxis Down Across the Board
The war that began with brutal attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran on Saturday 28 February has reverberated across the region. Several Middle Eastern countries hosting US bases have become targets of Iranian retaliation.
On Monday 2 March, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing provider, announced that two of its data centres in the United Arab Emirates and a facility in Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes. The facilities were immediately taken offline.
This has affected digital activity across the region. Consumer apps such as the delivery platform Careem, and payment services Alaan and Hubpay, were reported completely down due to issues with AWS infrastructure.
Banking providers, including ADBC and Emirates NBD, along with business software providers such as Snowflake, also reported service disruptions.
As information, the US-Israel attacks on Iran over the weekend killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, among other senior Iranian officials. In response, Iran vowed to retaliate with full force.
Military bases and critical infrastructure, including data centres and oil and gas production facilities in parts of the Middle East, were targeted, according to CNBC International, on Wednesday 4 March 2026.
“We will continue to strive to recover across different lines of work,” said AWS.
“We advise customers with workloads operating in the Middle East to take mitigation steps by relocating workloads to other AWS regions,” the company added.
AWS also confirmed that the Alaan web and mobile payment apps were down due to the outage of AWS’s critical infrastructure in the Middle East.
“As a result of widespread IT disruption in the Middle East, the mobile banking apps of ADBC and our Help Centre services are temporarily unavailable,” wrote ADBC in a post on X. Emirates NBD also disclosed similar issues on Monday 2 March; Emirates NBD’s services later returned to normal on Tuesday 3 March.
“Connectivity issues in the Middle East are expected to persist until the main issue is resolved,” Snowflake wrote in an incident report on Monday 2 March.
Sarwa Investment reported service disruption due to AWS issues. The company announced services were back to normal on Tuesday 3 March. Hubpay said customers may experience login problems due to the Monday 2 March disruption.
Careem announced it was back in operation, according to CEO Mudassir Sheikha on LinkedIn on Tuesday 3 March.
Mid-East Turbulence
Drone strikes occurred on Sunday 1 March, with objects hitting one of AWS data centres, creating sparks and fires, the company said on that day.
“In the UAE, two of our facilities were hit directly, while in Bahrain a drone strike near one of our facilities caused physical damage to our infrastructure,” AWS said on Monday 2 March.
“The strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required firefighting activities that caused further water damage,” AWS added.
As local operators hurried to restore services in the UAE, market reverberations were felt around the world.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran sent shockwaves through global energy markets. US stocks opened significantly lower on Tuesday morning, while European and Asian markets also fell. Oil prices rose further as supply disruption prospects grew.