Earlier on Saturday, cities across Iran, including the capital Tehran, were rocked by a series of airstrikes led by the US and Israel that killed the country’s supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, and top leadership. According to reports, the military campaign coincided with cyberattacks targeting the country, one of which flooded a popular phone app with notifications, amid ongoing internet outages in Iran.

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 top brass. shutting down the internet until today.

As missiles hit Iranian cities, people on the ground reported being inundated with unsolicited app notifications — not from the ailing government, but from an apparent outsider.

BadeSaba prayer app users received many notices on their phones, calling for a “reckoning” and promising amnesty for anyone who rebelled against government forces, per Wired.

One of the announcements said that the Iranian regime “will pay for their cruel and merciless actions against the innocent people of Iran,” implying that the app had been compromised to display an anti-government message.

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 cyberattacks were used as part of an attack by the US and Israel in an effort to limit Iran’s response. The US and Israel are suspected of conducting cyberattacks in banks and crypto exchanges to pressure the leadership of Iran, which has ruled since taking power in a 1989 revolution.

The ongoing disruption is not limited to Iran. The conflict threatens to spill over into the wider Middle East, as Iran retaliates with its own missiles.

Amazon says it experienced an outage at its Middle East data center in the United Arab Emirates, shortly after Iranian missiles hit the coastal nation. Amazon said its cut caused by “objects hitting the data center, creating sparks and fire.”

Conflict is also likely disrupt critical e-commerce routes by air and seawhile ships carrying goods through the Strait of Hormuz near Iran stopped.

Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis, said in a Bluesky post that internet connectivity dropped to near-zero levels soon after airstrikes hit the country on Saturday morning. The networking giant Cloudflare also confirmed the collapse of the internet in Iran on Saturday.