From airstrikes to algorithms: Iran-Israel war enters tech sector

Report by Wissam Nasrallah, English adaptation by Mariella Succar

In the current war, the danger no longer targets only military and vital facilities, but also servers, data centers and companies that quietly run people’s daily lives from behind screens.

Here, a massive strike is not always necessary to disrupt an entire region. The failure of a single cloud service or disruption to one digital network can affect financial services, shut down platforms and push entire countries into technological uncertainty.

Iran appears to have recognized the importance of this factor. Its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has threatened 18 American technology companies operating in the Middle East, placing major firms on its target list, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Tesla and Boeing. 

The reason given was that these companies contribute technically to U.S. and Israeli targeting infrastructure through software, artificial intelligence and cloud services.

This accusation does not come without context. Since 2021, Google and Amazon have worked with the Israeli government under a contract known as Project Nimbus, a project in which the Israeli military participated. The project provides cloud and digital services to Israeli ministries and institutions, including security institutions.

According to documents and leaks, Israel’s Defense Ministry has used Google services to store and process data and to analyze drone imagery using artificial intelligence.

In early March, Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain experienced service disruptions affecting iCloud services following drone attacks. Amazon also announced that its AWS region in Bahrain had suffered disruptions.

These outages are highly significant because the issue is not a single application, but digital infrastructure that affects economies, services, communications and digital trust itself.

This raises a key question: Are we witnessing an expansion of the war to target the technological backbone of the region?

What is increasingly clear is that war is no longer limited to the military and the economy; technology itself has become another front in modern conflict.