Early Saturday, cities across Iran, including its capital Tehran, were rocked by a series of US- and Israeli-led airstrikes that killed the country’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and the top leadership. According to reports, the military campaign coincided with cyber attacks targeting the country, one of which flooded a popular phone app with alerts, amid an ongoing Iranian internet outage.
The strikes came after several days of failed negotiations between Tehran and Washington. The negotiations took place after weeks of mass protests that have killed thousands of people alongside the country’s biggest internet shutdown to date.
As the missiles hit Iranian cities, people on the ground reported being inundated with unsolicited app alerts — not from the troubled government, but from an apparent stranger.
Users of BadeSaba prayer application received several notices on their phones, demanding an “accounting” and promising amnesty for anyone who rises up against government forces, per Wired.
One of the alerts said the Iranian regime would “pay for its cruel and merciless actions against the innocent people of Iran,” implying that the app was hacked to display anti-government messages.
It is not clear who is behind the hack of the app, which lists more than 5 million downloads.
The Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday that cyber attacks were used as part of US and Israeli attacks in an attempt to limit the Iranian response. Both the US and Israel have been suspected of carrying out cyber attacks on banks and crypto exchanges to pressure Iran’s leadership, which has ruled since it seized power in a 1989 revolution.
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The ongoing turmoil was not limited to Iran. The conflict threatens to spill over into the wider Middle East as Iran retaliates with missiles of its own.
Amazon said it was experiencing an outage at its Middle East data center in the United Arab Emirates shortly after Iranian missiles struck the coastal country. Amazon said his interruption was caused by “objects striking the data center, creating sparks and fire.”
Conflict is also likely to disrupt critical air and sea e-commerce routesas ships carrying goods through the Strait of Hormuz near Iran stop.
Doug Madory, director of Internet analytics at Kentik, said a post on Bluesky that internet connectivity dropped to almost zero immediately after the airstrikes that hit the country on Saturday morning. Networking giant Cloudflare also confirmed the collapse of Iran’s internet on Saturday.
