Iran has given an ominous warning that it plans to begin attacking US big tech companies across the Middle East, starting after 8 p.m. Tehran time.

Posting on its Telegram channel, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) included digital giants such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, as well as transport corporations like Tesla and Boeing.

Eighteen companies are on the warning list, as well as 29 facilities across the Gulf, with the IRGC urging employees of the companies to evacuate the buildings, and for civilians to avoid going anywhere near the vicinity of the sites.

It represents a move from proxy warfare into directly picking out commercial infrastructure, all of which Iran considers aiding and abetting the joint US and Israeli operation against Iran.

With companies like Palantir and JPMorgan also on the hit list, it shows how modern businesses are being targeted, changing the game of modern warfare.

Iran has previous

In early March, Iran bombed Amazon's cloud facilities, which its government took full responsibility for, as it said on its Telegram at the time: “Targeting Amazon and Microsoft in these operations has dealt a serious blow to the enemy's technological and information infrastructure.”

Data centers are considered quite soft targets, compared to military and energy facilities, with a gargantuan potential for disruption, such as banking downtime, supply chain bottlenecks, the loss of critical datasets from the cloud, and emergency alerts being impacted.

It has been a month since the assassination of Iran's former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran subsequently appointed his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as his successor, which raised speculation that Israel and its sophisticated surveillance systems may track him down next.

And with the conflict spreading across the Middle East, one wonders whether big tech companies can continue operating as major data and SI hubs should Iran follow through on these April 1st omens.

---