Roughly a year into World War II, Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe embarked on a brutal nighttime bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, known as the Blitz. Beginning September 7, 1940, London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, while attacks across Britain continued until May 1941. Britain had no way of stopping the German bombs from falling, but the mechanical howl of its air-raid sirens could at least warn its citizens that they were coming.
Eighty-six years later, war-weary civilians in Russia and Ukraine can’t even count on that. On Sunday evening, users of Ukraine’s air-alert app began receiving warnings that simply weren’t real. One message invoked Russia’s fearsome Oreshnik ballistic missile and a supposed nuclear attack.
The independent alert-monitoring service alerts.in.ua counted 122 bogus alert events in seven minutes, including 103 air-raid alerts, following a hacking attack on the app. More than 6.6 million people in Ukraine rely on the service on a daily basis to provide advance warning of potentially lethal Russian assaults. The disruption was compounded when the same alerts spread through various third-party warning services that rely on official data; some outdoor loudspeakers in Western Ukraine’s Lviv region even broadcast a false radiation alert.
Moscow time on Monday, users of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry app received warnings that nuclear warheads were heading toward regions across the country. Some were told to stockpile three weeks’ worth of food and shelter in basements. Similar messages appeared in regional emergency-service channels on Telegram and MAX, Russia’s state-backed messaging app.
We can’t yet say for sure who was behind the attacks, or whether they were connected, but they might well offer a glimpse into the next, somehow more dystopian chapter of modern warfare. There’s a special kind of cruelty to tampering with a civilian warning system. Unlike a military radar or battlefield communication link, its purpose is almost entirely humanitarian: to give defenseless citizens the best chance of saving themselves from a potentially fatal threat.
Even Britain’s analogue World War II air-raid sirens occasionally wailed in response to threats that never materialized. A false alarm here and there might send a city’s collective heart rate soaring and provoke a few choice expletives, but an honest mistake doesn’t necessarily destroy trust in the system. Londoners didn’t need to worry whether Nazi hackers were setting sirens wailing—or worse, sending an all-clear message just as German bombers arrived overhead.
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