More than three weeks into what the public coverage calls Donald Trump’s war on Iran, United States military forces have allegedly struck over 9,000 sites. That level of violence, combined with the longest internet shutdown in Iran’s history, has left many people in the dark. The government does not offer a public emergency alert service, so a group of volunteers decided to build their own.

Meet Mahsa Alert: a volunteer-built warning map

Mahsa Alert began as a project from Holistic Resilience, a US-based digital rights group led by Ahmad Ahmadian. The platform is named in reference to Mahsa Amini. It is a website and a pair of mobile apps built to be tiny and fast, and to work when internet access is flaky or absent.

What the tool does

  • Notifications: The platform sends push alerts when there are evacuation warnings from Israeli forces or when confirmed strikes appear.
  • Confirmed strike layer: Volunteers and OSINT investigators verify videos and images submitted through a Telegram bot or shared on social media, then plot confirmed strikes on the map.
  • Danger zones: The map highlights high-risk sites such as military and nuclear facilities so people can avoid them.
  • Local infrastructure: It shows hospitals, pharmacies, CCTV cameras, suspected checkpoints, religious sites, and locations of past protests.
  • Offline mode: Because connectivity is unreliable, the app can download tiny update packages. Recent updates have been as small as 60 kilobytes and typically stay under 100 kilobytes.

How the team verifies reports

Mahsa Alert relies on crowdsourced submissions. The team runs a verification process before placing reports on the map. Ahmad Ahmadian says they have a backlog of more than 3,000 reports that need checking. He adds that about 90 percent of the confirmed strikes they have mapped occurred at sites already marked as risky on the platform.

Adoption, reach, and limits

The service grew quickly. According to Ahmadian, the app went from near zero to over 100,000 daily active users in days, and roughly 335,000 people have used it this year. Based on limited telemetry, the team estimates about 28 percent of users access the platform from inside Iran.

Despite rapid uptake, Mahsa Alert has important limits. It is volunteer run, so verification takes time and the platform cannot deliver true real-time warning like a coordinated government alert system would. The project also has resource constraints and relies on community contributions and a small core team.

Attacks and impersonation

Since the wider conflict began, Mahsa Alert has faced frequent distributed denial-of-service attacks. The team also published a report they describe as an attempt to poison the platform’s domain reputation. In addition, several copycat domains using the Mahsa Alert brand were registered on the same day in February. The legitimate project says it had no role in those registrations.

Why it matters

Beyond immediate warnings, crowdsourced tools like Mahsa Alert help build a public record of events during conflict. Open source investigators played similar roles documenting strikes in Syria and in Ukraine. But volunteer projects cannot fully replace a national emergency alert system.

Mahmadian is candid about the limits. "There is no emergency alert in Iran," he says. "I wish we had more resources; we have a lot of ideas." He adds a cautious hope: "Hopefully Mahsa Alert will someday become unnecessary to have. Then it could be transformed for other coordination or emergency alerts for the future of Iran."