Early on Saturday, cities across Iran, including its capital Tehran, were rocked by a series of airstrikes led by the U.S. and Israel. The strikes killed the country’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and other top leadership. This military campaign coincided with cyberattacks targeting the nation, amid an ongoing widespread outage across the Iranian internet.
The strikes followed several days of failed negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Those negotiations were held after weeks of mass protests that saw thousands of people killed alongside the country’s longest internet shutdown to date.
As missiles struck Iranian cities, people on the ground reported being flooded with unsolicited app notifications. Users of the popular BadeSaba prayer app, which lists more than 5 million downloads, received several notifications on their phones. The messages called for a “reckoning” and promised amnesty for anyone who rises up against government forces. One notification said the Iranian regime would “pay for their cruel and merciless actions against the innocent people of Iran,” implying the app was compromised to display anti-government messaging. It is not clear who is behind the hack.
Reports indicate that cyberattacks were used as part of the U.S. and Israeli strikes in an effort to limit the Iranian response. Both nations have previously been suspected of conducting cyberattacks on Iranian banks and crypto exchanges to pressure the country’s leadership.
The ongoing disruption has not been limited to Iran. The conflict threatens to spill into the wider Middle East as Iran retaliates with its own missiles. Amazon reported it was experiencing an outage at its Middle East data center in the United Arab Emirates soon after Iranian missiles hit the coastal country. Amazon stated the outage was caused by “objects that struck the data center, creating sparks and fire.”
The conflict is also likely to disrupt critical ecommerce air and sea routes, as ships carrying goods through the Strait of Hormuz near Iran grind to a halt.
Internet analysts confirmed a severe collapse of Iran’s connectivity. Internet connectivity dropped to near-zero levels soon after airstrikes hit the country on Saturday morning, a collapse also confirmed by networking companies.