It's Monday morning in the Gulf and you can't check your bank account. Not because you've forgotten your password or because the app needs an update, but because the infrastructure that holds the thing together has, in a quite literal sense, been set on fire.
You go to open your investment platform and it too won't load. You try order a taxi to get to work and that's not working either. Your investments, your savings, your ability to move money, all of it is sitting behind a screen that will not respond, and you have no idea whether your portfolio is intact, whether a trade you placed on Thursday has settled, whether the money you sent to your landlord actually arrived.
Now layer on the fact that Iranian drones are in the sky, that missiles have been raining down over the weekend, that your phone is a torrent of news alerts and WhatsApp forwards and speculation, that the stock exchanges have been suspended, and that the general mood is one of profound and understandable unease.
In that context, the inability to verify that your financial life is where you left it isn't just a minor inconvenience. It's the kind of thing that makes your mouth dry, your temples pulse, and your chest tighten.
That was the reality for hundreds of thousands of people across the UAE on March 3rd, and the cause was a cascading failure in Amazon Web Services' regional infrastructure that took down a staggering cross-section of the country's digital economy in a single weekend.
Fintech platforms like Sarwa, Stake, Alaan, Abhi, Ziina, Hubpay, Baraka were all temporarily taken offline. Super-app stalwart Careem lost rides and payments. ADCB, the country's third-largest bank, lost its app and its contact centre. The Capital Markets Authority suspended trading on both the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange and the Dubai Financial Market.
And AWS itself was telling customers to move their operations to entirely different parts of the world.
FWDstart spoke to the leaders of two of the fintechs caught in the middle of it, Mark Chahwan, Co-founder and Group CEO of Sarwa, and Omair Ansari, Co-founder and CEO of Abhi, to understand what the crisis actually looked like from inside the building, how they got their platforms back online, and what it all means for the way the UAE's tech sector is thinking about infrastructure going forward. We also spoke to Anas Abdullah of MilkStraw, a UAE startup that helps companies optimise their AWS bills, on what the outage laid bare about the region's cloud infrastructure.
Most of what has been written about this outage so far has been written from the outside. This is the view from the inside.
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