Ok, this is getting really serious. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claims it has targeted an Oracle data center in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Yes, you read that right. A datacenter. Physical cloud infrastructure. The war has stepped off the political map and landed squarely in the tech world. **How did we get here?** The alleged strike came only two days after Iran threatened to begin hitting American tech companies it deemed to be assisting U.S. and Israeli military operations. In a list reported widely by Iranian state media, Oracle was explicitly named, alongside Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, HP, Tesla, Nvidia, Boeing, IBM, and Cisco. Basically, Iran published a target list and then went after it. That's not a metaphor. **Why Oracle specifically?** Oracle has active cloud and AI partnerships with the U.S. Department of Defense. On top of that, the company's billionaire founder and chairman Larry Ellison has well-documented ties to the Israeli government. Two reasons more than enough to land at the top of the list, apparently. **What does the UAE say?** The UAE's Ministry of Interior confirmed that the country's air defenses intercepted 5 ballistic missiles and 35 drones originating from Iran on Wednesday, and 19 ballistic missiles and 26 drones on Thursday. Emirati forces have yet to independently confirm any successful strike on Dubai. But here's the interesting part: that doesn't mean nothing happened. A Bellingcat investigation published on Thursday claims that over the past month, the UAE has "downplayed damage, mischaracterised interceptions and in some instances not acknowledged successful Iranian drone strikes on the country." **And Amazon wasn't left out either** The IRGC also claimed to have targeted Amazon facilities in Bahrain. Bahrain's Ministry of Interior confirmed it had dealt with a fire "in a facility of a company as a result of the Iranian aggression." Amazon's cloud division AWS did not confirm whether its facilities were the ones hit, but an anonymously sourced Financial Times report identified them as such. **What does this mean for us, devs?** Here's the part no cloud tutorial ever taught you: physical infrastructure matters. It always has. We put our data, our apps, our businesses in datacenters sitting somewhere in the real world, with real locations, in geopolitically sensitive regions. The war has been devastating the broader region for 34 days, with estimates of over 1,600 civilian fatalities in Iran alone, including at least 244 children. This is not a disaster recovery drill. This is reality. If you have critical workloads running in the Middle East region, now is a good time to revisit your multi-region strategy. And if you still don't have a geopolitical contingency plan... well, consider this your wake-up call. Oracle has not yet commented. The cloud is still up. For now. --- Source: https://gizmodo.com/iran-says-it-hit-oracle-facilities-in-uae-2000741785