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. Reports indicate the military campaign coincided with cyberattacks targeting the nation. One such cyberattack flooded a popular phone app with notifications amid an ongoing nationwide internet outage.
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. These messages did not come from the government but from an apparent outsider. Users of the BadeSaba prayer app received several notifications on their phones calling for a reckoning and promising 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 of the app, which lists more than five million downloads.
Cyberattacks were reportedly used as part of the U.S. and Israeli attacks in an effort to limit the Iranian response. Both the U.S. and Israel have been suspected of conducting cyberattacks on banks and crypto exchanges to pressure Iran’s leadership, which has ruled since taking power in a 1989 revolution.
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 said 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 e-commerce air and sea routes, as ships carrying goods through the Strait of Hormuz near Iran grind to a halt. Internet connectivity in Iran dropped to near-zero levels soon after airstrikes hit the country on Saturday morning, a collapse also confirmed by networking analysts.