KYIV — Ukraine's Air Force said late on Sunday that the country's public air raid alert app had been hacked, after it briefly showed Kyiv and other areas facing nuclear and chemical alerts and a threat of street fighting, Reuters reported. One erroneous message said Russia's hypersonic Oreshnik missile had been deployed.

Source: Reuters, Nov 1

“The air alert app appears to have been subjected to enemy influence,” the Air Force said on Telegram, according to Reuters. “There is no radiation threat! Stay calm and follow our updates on our channel!” The abnormality later disappeared, Reuters said.

Source: Reuters, Nov 1

The false sequence began at about 22:47 local time (20:47 GMT) with a message declaring a radiation threat in Kyiv, BBC News reported. A minute later, a message written in Russian claimed a nuclear alert would follow across the whole country and referred to a missile in flight, and at 22:49 two further messages warned of a chemical attack on Kyiv and said street fighting was taking place in the capital, telling people not to go outside, the BBC said.

Source: BBC News via World Right Now, Nov 1

The bogus warnings were not confined to Kyiv. The app displayed nuclear, chemical and street-fighting warnings for Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, and street-fighting and artillery alerts for Zaporizhzhia in the south-east, while a radiation hazard signal was played over loudspeaker devices in the Lviv region in the west, BBC News reported. Each false warning was then followed by its own all-clear message, and the display later returned to normal.

Source: BBC News via World Right Now, Nov 1

Ukraine's central intelligence agency also posted on Telegram describing a failure in the app and advising people to check other sources to confirm the air-threat situation, BBC News reported. The governor of the Vinnytsia region, Natalya Zabolotna, described what happened as a cyberattack on the Air Alert app and warned residents on Telegram not to click a link contained in one of the messages, the BBC said.

Source: BBC News via World Right Now, Nov 1

Ukraine's Ministry for Digital Transformation said the app was not in operation, but other means of alerting the public were functioning, as were air raid sirens, Reuters reported. Ukrainian officials have described the interference as hostile; how the app was compromised has not been established in the information released so far, and no evidence publicly attributing the hack to a named actor was reported by either outlet.

Source: Reuters, Nov 1

Officials repeated their standing advice: keep notifications on, listen for sirens and rely only on official channels for threat information. For now the authorities' message is consistent — there was no radiation, chemical or street-fighting threat of the kind the app described on Sunday night.