Early Saturday morning, cities across Iran, including the 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. The military operation coincided with cyberattacks targeting the country, including one that flooded popular phone apps with notifications amid ongoing outages across Iran's internet, the report said.
The airstrike came after several days of negotiations between Tehran and Washington failed. The negotiations came after weeks of mass protests that left thousands dead and the longest internet shutdown in the country's history.
When missiles hit Iranian cities, people on the ground reported being flooded with unsolicited app notifications, apparently from outsiders rather than the ailing government.
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According to Wired, users of the BadeSaba prayer app received notifications on their phones calling for “reckoning” and promising amnesty for those who rose up against government forces.
One of the notices states that the Iranian government will “pay the price for its cruel and merciless acts against the innocent Iranian people,” suggesting that the app was compromised to display anti-government messages.
It's 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 cyberattack was used as part of a U.S. and Israeli offensive aimed at limiting Iran's response. Both the United States and Israel are suspected of carrying out cyberattacks on banks and cryptocurrency exchanges to put pressure on Iran's leadership, which has ruled since it came to power in a 1989 revolution.
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The ongoing turmoil is not limited to Iran. Iran is retaliating with missiles of its own, and the conflict threatens to spread across the Middle East.
Amazon announced an outage at its Middle East data center in the United Arab Emirates shortly after an Iranian missile hit the coastal country. Amazon said the outage was caused by “an object striking our data center, causing sparks and fire.”
The conflict could also disrupt key air and sea routes for e-commerce, as ships carrying goods through the Strait of Hormuz near Iran are held up.
Doug Madley, director of internet analysis at Kentik, said in a post on Blue Sky that internet connectivity dropped to near-zero levels immediately after the airstrike on Saturday morning. Networking giant Cloudflare also acknowledged the collapse of Iran's internet on Saturday.