A huge fire has engulfed two high-rise towers in an apartment complex in the United Arab Emirates, sending residents fleeing into the streets as embers rained down on the city.

The fire broke out in the 30-storey Ajman One apartment complex in the city of Ajman, about 50 kilometres from Dubai, about 9.45pm on Monday, local time, according to Gulf News.

Footage of the inferno showed flames and black smoke shooting from at least two towers in the complex. A large crowd, many of them tenants who had been evacuated, stood and watched as thee apartments burned, and traffic ground to a halt.

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Gulf News reported that tenants were being evacuated to safety, however it was not clear whether there were any casualties.

Bismillah, a tenant from the apartment block, said she and her three children rushed down 19 floors to safety.

"We are all very distraught. We have lost everything," she told Gulf News.

 

Many tenants were in tears as the building burned, Gulf News said.

"All I have left are the clothes on my back, " said a tenant who lived on the 22nd floor of one of the towers. 

"My colleague is coming to pick me up. I am too disturbed to make sense of it all."

Another resident, Katerina, said the fire took hold extremely quickly.

"I can't believe how quickly all this happened. I saw the fire from my window and as a precaution grabbed my documents and left the building. It was not a huge fire then," she said.

The blaze comes less than three months after a skyscraper in Dubai was destroyed by fire, prompting questions about the safety of buildings in the Emirates. That blaze broke out at the luxury 63-storey hotel The Address on New Year's Eve, tearing up the outside of the building "like paper", according to onlookers and causing a stampede of revellers.

The New Year's Eve blaze was the third to hit a Dubai skyscraper since 2012, and renewed fears about the use of highly combustible materials on hundreds of skyscrapers throughout the United Arab Emirates, The Telegraph in London reported.  At the heart of safety concerns was the use of polyurethane and aluminium composite cladding on buildings throughout the height of the emirate's building boom. The material was outlawed by new regulations in 2013.