CEO Mudassir Sheikha confirmed on Tuesday morning that all Careem services have been restored after the company's engineering teams worked through the night to execute a cross-regional infrastructure migration, moving Careem's systems off the affected AWS UAE region and onto servers elsewhere, in response to the data centre outage that knocked cloud services offline across the Gulf on Sunday evening.
Rides, Hala, and Careem Pay onboarding were all taken down by the outage, which began after unidentified objects struck an AWS facility in the UAE at approximately 4:30pm on Sunday, triggering a fire and a full power shutdown that cascaded across multiple AWS clusters in the UAE and Bahrain.
Food, Quik, Shops, and Box were unaffected and continued operating at full capacity throughout, with the Quik team prioritising daily and Ramadan essentials.
Sheikha said he was "incredibly grateful to my colleagues who successfully executed a cross-regional infrastructure migration while personally navigating a high-stress environment," adding that "their ability to deliver under these conditions is a testament to both their grit and their trust in UAE's leadership." He signed off with "praying for peace and sanity."
Sarwa, Stake, Liv by Emirates NBD, and Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank were among the platforms affected by the same outage, and it is not yet clear how many have completed similar migrations or are still waiting for AWS to restore the original UAE infrastructure.
