Yesterday I sat down to deploy a new build of IlanoShop to Vercel.
It failed. Not with an obscure error I'd never seen before — just a quiet, frustrating non-response. The kind of thing you spend twenty minutes debugging before you go looking for a status page.
What I found stopped me in my tracks.
The Status Page Read Like a War Bulletin
Vercel's incident log, timestamped March 2, 2026:
"Due to operational issues in the dxb1 region, traffic is currently re-routed to bom1. Additionally, dxb1 is currently unavailable as a Function Region for new deployments."
dxb1. Dubai, UAE.
I opened a news tab. Iranian missiles and drones had been striking Dubai for the third consecutive day. Explosions at Palm Jumeirah. Debris damage to the Burj Al Arab. Dubai International Airport struck and evacuated. Over 19,000 flights disrupted across the region. Three people killed on UAE soil, 58 injured.
My deployment had failed because a war had taken out a data centre region.
I sat with that for a while.
The Invisible Infrastructure of the Internet
We talk a lot about the internet being "the cloud" — this weightless, borderless, everywhere-and-nowhere thing. But it isn't. It's cables under oceans. It's server farms in specific buildings, in specific cities, in specific countries. It runs on power grids and cooling systems and fibre networks that are very much attached to physical land.
And when that land is under attack, the cloud goes dark.
Dubai — the dxb1 region in Vercel's infrastructure — is not just a holiday destination or a financial hub. It's one of the most critical nodes in global internet routing. A bridge between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Gulf. When Iranian strikes began hitting UAE infrastructure from February 28 onwards, the ripple effects weren't just felt by travellers stranded at airports. They were felt by developers deploying code. By businesses running on cloud functions. By platforms like mine, trying to push a routine update on a Tuesday afternoon.
Vercel rerouted dxb1 traffic to bom1 — Mumbai, India — the nearest available region. The system worked as designed. But the fact that it needed to tells a story worth understanding.
War Has Always Had an Invisible Economic Tail
The headlines from this conflict are about missiles and drone strikes, about geopolitics and military strategy, about what happens to the Gulf states caught between Washington and Tehran. And those are the right things to lead with — three people died on UAE soil, and the human cost of this conflict across the region is devastating.
But war also has an invisible tail — the economic and infrastructural disruption that spreads far beyond the blast radius, touching people and businesses who have no stake in the conflict and no say in how it unfolds.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi — vital transit routes to Asia and Australia — saw widespread disruption, with airline shares falling sharply and air freight routes being upended. With the Iranian and Iraqi corridors blocked, global air traffic was forced into overcrowded alternative routes, representing what analysts described as a shift from "intermittent disruption" to a "structural security crisis."
And beneath the flights and the freight, quieter disruptions were happening. Developers couldn't deploy. Businesses couldn't access cloud functions. Platforms that relied on dxb1 as their primary or nearest region were suddenly failing in ways that had nothing to do with their code.
That's the part nobody writes about. But it's real, and it matters.
What This Made Me Think About
I'm building IlanoShop for small businesses — people for whom a failed deployment isn't a minor inconvenience, it's a direct hit to their livelihood. A store that goes down during a busy period, a checkout that stops working, a product update that never ships — these things have real consequences for real people operating on thin margins.
And I had no control over what happened yesterday. Neither did they.
We build on cloud infrastructure because it's efficient, scalable, and — most of the time — remarkably reliable. Multi-region failover exists precisely for moments like this. Vercel's bom1 fallback did its job. But "the system worked" and "this is fine" are not the same statement.
The deeper question that yesterday raised for me: how much of the digital infrastructure underpinning small businesses globally is concentrated in regions that geopolitical events can take offline without warning? And how many of those businesses — the ones I'm building IlanoShop to serve — have any awareness of that fragility, let alone any resilience against it?
Most don't. Most just see the error message. They don't see the drone strike behind it.
A Note on Proportion
I want to be careful here. A failed deployment is a minor inconvenience. What happened in Dubai last week — three people killed, 58 injured, landmark buildings damaged, an airport struck and evacuated — is not a tech story. It's a human tragedy, and the people caught in it deserve that framing first.
This piece isn't an attempt to centre a deployment frustration in the middle of a war. It's an attempt to trace the thread — to show that the effects of armed conflict don't stop at the borders of the conflict zone. They travel along cables and through server farms and into the mundane, everyday moments of people trying to do ordinary work on the other side of the world.
That thread matters because it's invisible. And invisible things don't get fixed.
The Slug in the Logs
There's a line in Vercel's incident update that I keep coming back to:
"Deployments using multiple regions or failover regions are not affected since traffic is automatically routed to the nearest region based on the configured settings."
It's practical, helpful guidance. But read another way, it's also a quiet acknowledgement that building for resilience — distributing your infrastructure, planning for region failure — is no longer just a performance consideration. It's a geopolitical one.
The nearest region to Dubai that was still online yesterday was Mumbai.
I'll be thinking about that next time I configure a deployment.