122 false alarms in seven minutes, and the sirens never lied

On Sunday night, at about 22:47 Kyiv time (21:47 CET), Ukraine’s Air Alert app began pushing red-level warnings across the country¹. Kyiv users got more: a “radiation threat”, a “chemical threat” and “street fighting” in the capital¹. The BBC counted 122 fake alerts between 22:47 and 22:54¹. One, written in Russian, told Ukrainians not to worry, “the Oreshnik is incoming”, a reference to a Russian intermediate-range missile².

Hours later Russia’s emergencies ministry said its own app had been hit by a “massive cyber-attack” and that false alerts had gone out across 33 of Russia’s 89 regions at about 2:45 a.m. Moscow time^1,2. A Russian Telegram channel said a group called Hitcore had claimed the Ukrainian breach; that could not be verified². It is not clear whether the two attacks were linked^1,2. A Ukrainian MP said he could “neither confirm nor deny” Ukrainian involvement in the Russian one¹.

Now the part that went right. Ukraine’s air force posted at 23:02, about a quarter of an hour after the first fake, that the app had “likely been compromised” and “There is no radiation threat!”¹. All-clear messages followed¹. Air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said the app is separate from military command systems, so defence operations were not affected². Moscow said the same of its side: the app is “supplementary”; sirens, loudspeakers, SMS, television and radio were working normally^1,2.

The quieter lesson is about redundancy. Widespread panic appears to have been avoided, the BBC’s Kyiv correspondent reported, because so many alerts arriving so fast looked like a fault¹. Ukrainians, used to genuine alerts as often as 20 times a day, also noticed that one message came in Russian, which “immediately aroused suspicions”, MP Oleksandr Merezhko said¹. One Lviv mother told the BBC she grew suspicious at “street fighting”: “that’s impossible”¹. That is media literacy working late at night.

For you, wherever you live, the takeaway is practical. Know your country’s official warning channels beyond a single app, and treat any alert that tells you to tap a link as suspect. Ukraine’s emergency service gave exactly that advice¹. An alarm system is a chain; the best chains have several links that fail independently.