“The recent AWS disruptions were a reminder that even the most advanced digital infrastructure ultimately relies on physical systems that can be affected by real-world events,” says Aline de Albuquerque Pereira, founder of THE SOLUTION UAE, a PR agency, describing the operational impact her firm experienced following recent disruptions to Amazon Web Services infrastructure in the Gulf.
“Like many organizations in the region, we experienced temporary operational hurdles like limited access to payment portals and delays in certain cloud-based tools,” she adds. “This required quick internal coordination and contingency planning, dragging the process into a more manual one.”
The recent disruptions, triggered after drone strikes damaged data centre infrastructure in the UAE and Bahrain amid regional tensions, have highlighted the deep dependence of marketing agencies, CPG firms and digital businesses on centralized cloud infrastructure for everyday operations.
For many smaller marketing firms, the impact extended beyond workflow delays into financial operations.
Nimrah Khan, Director of Marketing and Communications at Kollab Digital, says the outage created a chain reaction affecting licensing access and banking compliance.
“My marketing agency is registered with Ajman Free Zone, and their systems were recently impacted due to issues with AWS servers. We were notified that the portal would be down, but there was no clear indication or timeline on when it would be restored,” she says.
The disruption escalated when documentation required for banking compliance became inaccessible.
“Around the same time, I noticed that my business bank WIO required me to upload an updated trade license. Normally this is straightforward, but to retrieve the document I needed access to the Ajman Free Zone customer portal, which was unfortunately down due to this disruption,” she explains.
The situation soon began affecting business continuity.
“Because of this, I was unable to download or access my updated license from the portal. While waiting for the system to come back online, WIO temporarily suspended my business banking since the document could not be uploaded,” she says.
“With Ajman Free Zone’s portal inaccessible and no way to retrieve the documents I needed, I was essentially left stranded trying to resolve the situation.”
She adds that such incidents show how fragile digital dependence has become.
“Situations like this highlight how dependent small businesses have become on centralized digital infrastructure, and how outages beyond our control can quickly translate into operational and financial disruption.”