On March 11, the 12th day of the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) released a list. Distributed via Telegram by the IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency, it named Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, IBM, Oracle, and Palantir - together with their specific regional offices, data centres, and research facilities, as legitimate targets. The IRGC-linked Khatam al-Anbiya Headquarters, Iran's unified military command, framed the announcement in language that should concern every government and technology executive on earth: "As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran's legitimate targets expands."

The declaration was not rhetoric. It came 10 days after Iranian drone strikes had already hit three Amazon Web Services facilities across the Gulf - two data centres in the United Arab Emirates struck directly, a third in Bahrain damaged by a nearby explosion. AWS confirmed structural damage, disrupted power systems, and fire suppression activity that caused additional water damage. Two of three availability zones in the UAE region went offline. Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, the payments firm Hubpay, and the ride-sharing platform Careem all reported significant service disruptions. Iran stated explicitly that the facilities were targeted because AWS hosts United States military workloads. The Uptime Institute described it as the first confirmed kinetic strike on a hyperscale cloud provider in history.

Link: https://www.ndtv.com/opinion/iran-israel-war-the-dangerous-list-of-tech-firms-iran-plans-to-target-11209577