Hackers and internet outages hit Iran amid US airstrikes

Early Saturday, a series of airstrikes led by the United States and Israel rocked cities across Iran, including the capital, Tehran, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and the top leadership. According to reports, the military campaign coincided with cyberattacks targeting the country, one of which flooded a popular phone application with notifications, amid ongoing outages across the Iranian Internet.

The strikes came after several days of failed negotiations between Tehran and Washington. The negotiations were held after weeks of mass protests that saw thousands of people killed along with the country’s longest internet shutdown to date.

As missiles hit Iranian cities, people on the ground reported receiving a deluge of unwanted app notifications — not from the ailing government, but from an obvious outsider.

Users of the BadeSaba prayer app received several notifications on their phones, demanding a “reckoning” and promising to pardon anyone who rises up against government forces, according to Wired.

One notification said that the Iranian regime “will pay the price for its cruel and brutal actions against the innocent Iranian people,” implying that the app had been hacked to display anti-government messages.

It is not clear who is behind the hack of the app, which has more than 5 million downloads.

The Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday that the cyberattacks were used as part of US and Israeli attacks in an attempt to limit Iranian response. Both the United States and Israel are suspected of launching cyberattacks on banks and cryptocurrency exchanges to pressure Iran’s leadership, which has ruled since taking power in the 1989 revolution.

The ongoing turmoil is not limited to Iran. The conflict threatens to spill over into the wider Middle East, where 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 hit the coastal nation. Amazon said the outage was caused by “objects that collided with the data center and caused sparks and fire.”

The conflict is also likely to disrupt vital air and sea routes for e-commerce, as ships carrying goods through the Strait of Hormuz stop near Iran.

Internet connectivity dropped to near-zero levels shortly after the air strikes hit the country on Saturday morning, Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, said in a post on Bluesky’s website. Networking giant Cloudflare also confirmed the internet crash in Iran on Saturday.