Late on Sunday night, phones across Ukraine lit up with the most frightening warnings of the war — a radiation hazard in Kyiv, a chemical attack, street fighting in the capital, and one message in Russian announcing that a nuclear alert was about to sound across the whole country because Russia's Oreshnik missile was on its way. None of it was real. Ukraine's Air Force says the country's official Air Alert app, the application millions of people rely on to know when to run for shelter, was hacked.
The fake warnings came in a burst — four messages between 10:47 and 10:49 on Sunday night. The first, in Ukrainian, declared a radiation threat in Kyiv. A minute later came the message in Russian: "Hi! A nuclear alert is about to go off all across Ukraine! Don't worry, the Oreshnik is on its way." Then a chemical attack alert for Kyiv, and a warning of street fighting telling people not to go outside. At least one message carried a link to a Telegram channel — and officials in the regions were quick to warn people not to tap it, because a link riding on a fake emergency alert is exactly how phishing traps are set.
The Air Force answered about ten minutes later on its Telegram channel, saying the app had likely been subjected to hostile interference. Its message was blunt: "There is no radiation threat! Stay calm and follow our updates on our channel!" Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat later confirmed to AFP that the app had been hacked. Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation said the threat information showing in the app did not correspond to reality — and in the Lviv region, the fake radiation signal had even been played out over street loudspeakers before officials shut that down too.
The app's own developers then confirmed that third parties had carried out unauthorised interference, disabled push notifications and suspended the app while they worked on it, noting that it stores no personal data. Just before midnight, about an hour after the fakes appeared, all-clear messages went out clearing each false threat one by one, and by midnight the State Emergency Service said the nationwide warning system was operating normally. That wider system — the one feeding regional administrations and street sirens — had never stopped working, and Kyiv residents were pointed to the separate Kyiv Digital app, which was unaffected.
On who did it, the claims and the proof are two different things. SPRAVDI, Ukraine's Centre for Strategic Communications, said flatly on X that Russians hacked the app, pointing to the Russian-language Oreshnik message. The Air Force itself said only that the interference was hostile and from the enemy. No technical evidence identifying the attackers has been made public, no group has claimed responsibility, and how the attackers got inside the app is still unknown.
Why this matters goes beyond one frightening hour. A warning app has only one asset: when it sounds, people believe it instantly and move. Fake nuclear warnings are a weapon aimed at that belief — every false alarm teaches a frightened public to hesitate, and hesitation is measured in lives when the next alert is real. For families living under nightly missile and drone attacks, a warning system that cannot be faked is not a tech story; it is the difference between a signal they can trust with their children's lives and one they have to stop and question first.
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