Newsletters
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a stark warning on Tuesday that some of the world's largest American technology companies, among them Apple, Google and Meta, face destruction of their facilities if Iranian officials continue to be killed in what the Guards described as "targeted assassinations."
The threat, delivered via an official statement, named 18 companies the IRGC alleged were complicit in the killings of Iranian leaders. It set a deadline of 8:00 p.m. Tehran time, or 4:30 p.m. GMT, on Wednesday, April 1, for employees to vacate those workplaces. "We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately leave their workplaces to preserve their lives," the Guards said.
The IRGC framed the threat as retaliatory and conditional, warning that the named companies should "expect the destruction of their relevant units in exchange for every assassination in Iran." The statement positions the technology firms not as incidental targets but as entities the Guards claim bear direct responsibility for intelligence and operational support behind the killings of Iranian officials, a charge the companies have not publicly addressed.
The IRGC has in recent weeks broadened its declared target set to include US technology infrastructure across the Middle East, framing the move as a shift from conventional military engagement toward what it has called "infrastructure war." American tech firms operate offices, data centers and cloud infrastructure across Israel and Gulf states, making their regional footprints a focal point of Iranian military messaging.
That posture has already translated into physical strikes. On March 1, Iranian drones hit three Amazon Web Services facilities, two in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain, in what analysts described as the first known military attack on a major commercial cloud provider's physical infrastructure.
The strikes caused structural damage, power disruptions and water damage from fire suppression systems, knocking out two of three availability zones in AWS's UAE region and one in Bahrain, overwhelming standard redundancy safeguards. The outages rippled across the Gulf, disrupting banking services at major lenders including Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emirates NBD, as well as payments platforms and consumer applications.
The IRGC justified the data center strikes by claiming the facilities hosted US military and intelligence workloads, including Anthropic's Claude AI model, which multiple reports indicated was being used by the American military for intelligence analysis and targeting.
AWS declined to comment on those claims. Iranian state media had also previously published a list of roughly 29 additional locations across Bahrain, Israel, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, encompassing facilities run by Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Palantir, Nvidia and Oracle, labeling them "Iran's new targets in the region."
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
1 min read
1 min read
