Online and phone banking services of some banks in the UAE were unavailable on Monday due to a region-wide disruption of IT services.
Customers in the UAE were not able to access phone banking of Emirates NBD in Dubai, as well as digital banking services of First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.
It was not clear if the outages were related to a fire at an Amazon Web Services data centre in the UAE, which happened on the same day that Iran attempted to strike key sites in the Emirates.
“Due to a recent region-wide IT disruption, our Phone Banking services are temporarily impacted. Teams are working to restore services at the earliest, and we will inform you when they are restored,” Emirates NBD said in a notice on its NBD X app.
The lender, Dubai's biggest by market cap, said all other banking services for its customers “continued to be available”.
The notice on the FAB digital app said the bank is experiencing “intermittent service disruption” and is actively working to resolve the issue.
ADCB's digital app showed an alert for customers, saying: “We are unable to carry out your instructions currently. Please try later.”
On ADCB's Instagram page, the lender said it is experiencing technical issues, which may be "affecting some of our platform and mobile app users", and its team is working to resolve the issue.
The National has reached out to the banks' representatives for further comments.
