The UAE Ministry of Interior (MoI) announced that its widely used smartphone application will undergo planned maintenance from 02:00 to 05:00 on Monday, 28 September (local time). The downtime, flagged on 26 September via the ministry’s social-media channels and reported by Gulf News, will render services such as fine payments, residency-status checks and emergency-help chat temporarily unavailable. Although the window falls during low-traffic hours, HR teams handling last-minute visa renewals or exit-permits for employees departing early Monday could be affected. The MoI urged users to “complete urgent transactions in advance” and confirmed that back-end database upgrades are intended to improve response times for high-volume services like entry-permit issuance and weapons-licence renewals. The MoI app forms part of the UAE’s single sign-on ‘UAE Pass’ ecosystem linking dozens of federal and emirate-level e-government platforms. Any unscheduled glitch can ripple across systems run by the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security (ICP), potentially delaying visa amendments or Emirates ID updates. While no broader outages are expected, companies planning bulk immigration filings after the weekend should schedule uploads for Monday afternoon to avoid failed transactions. The ministry said push-notifications would confirm service resumption once tests are complete. Digital-government analysts note that the public pre-notification is in line with ISO 20000 service-management standards and signals a maturing change-control culture within UAE federal IT operations.
Source: Gulf News
