No Government Alerts, No Problem: Iranian Volunteers Build Their Own Crisis Warning Map

When Governments Go Silent, Citizens Find a Way

Long before Israeli and American airstrikes began targeting Iran, ordinary Iranians were already navigating a dangerous information blackout. The Iranian government's iron grip on digital infrastructure had left tens of millions of people without access to reliable, independent news or emergency services. Now, a dedicated group of digital rights volunteers has stepped in to fill that void with a tool that is quietly changing how Iranians experience crisis — a dynamic crowdsourced mapping platform called Mahsa Alert.

The platform cannot replicate the speed of a government-coordinated early warning system, but it does something arguably just as valuable: it delivers push notifications when Israeli forces issue attack warnings, marks verified strike locations on an interactive map, and works even when internet connectivity drops out entirely.

The Organization Behind the Map

Mahsa Alert is the creation of Holistic Resilience, a US-based digital rights organization led by Ahmad Ahmadian, who serves as president and CEO. According to Ahmadian, the absence of any public emergency alert infrastructure in Iran made the need for such a tool immediately obvious.

"There is no emergency alert in Iran," Ahmadian explains. "This was where we saw the traction, we saw the need, and we continued working on it with the volunteers, with some open source intelligence experts."

Development began last summer, following the 12-day Israel-Iran conflict, and the platform has been evolving rapidly ever since — shaped by real conditions on the ground and the urgent demands of its growing user base.

Engineered for Survival Conditions

Mahsa Alert is available as both a website and as dedicated Android and iOS applications. Every design decision reflects the harsh digital realities inside Iran. The apps were intentionally built to be lightweight and functional across virtually any device — because in a country where the government throttles or cuts internet access without warning, a bloated app is a useless one.

Offline functionality was built into the platform from the start. Users can download APK update files during brief windows of connectivity, and those files are kept extraordinarily small. A recent update clocked in at just 60 kilobytes, with most updates capping at around 100 kilobytes — small enough to pull down even on the most restricted connection.

What the Map Actually Shows

Mahsa Alert layers several categories of critical information onto its mapping interface:

Confirmed Strike Locations

Attacks displayed on the map have been independently verified by Ahmadian's team or external open source intelligence (OSINT) investigators. Verification relies on video footage, photographs, and reports submitted through a dedicated Telegram bot or surfaced from social media. With more than 3,000 unverified reports currently in the backlog, the vetting process is painstaking but deliberate.

Danger Zones

The platform flags areas considered high-risk for future attacks — including sites associated with Iran's nuclear program and military installations — so that civilians can actively avoid them. Ahmadian notes that roughly 90 percent of confirmed strikes occurred at locations that had already been marked on the map.

Evacuation Warnings

Areas where Israeli forces have issued formal evacuation alerts are highlighted, giving residents advance notice to move.

Civilian Infrastructure

The map also plots thousands of CCTV camera locations, suspected government checkpoints, hospitals, pharmacies, religious sites, and locations tied to past protests — creating a comprehensive picture of both risk and resources available to ordinary Iranians.

From Zero to 100,000 Daily Users

As Iranians at home and in the diaspora began sharing the platform across global social media networks, Mahsa Alert's growth became dramatic. According to Ahmadian, the app surged from near-zero to over 100,000 daily active users in just a matter of days. Total users for the year have reached approximately 335,000, with the first major spike occurring during the Iranian regime's violent crackdown on anti-government protesters in January.

Perhaps most tellingly, Ahmadian says the platform's limited data collection suggests that roughly 28 percent of active users are accessing Mahsa Alert from inside Iran itself — a remarkable figure given the country's pervasive surveillance environment and restrictions on digital activity.

A Name With Meaning

The platform's name is a deliberate tribute to Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman whose death in police custody in 2022 ignited a sweeping wave of reform protests across the country. Her story has become inseparable from the broader struggle for civil liberties in Iran, and naming the alert system after her reflects the project's roots in that ongoing fight.

Operating Under Threat

Running an independent information platform in direct opposition to Iranian state interests comes with serious consequences. Ahmadian confirms that Mahsa Alert has faced repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since its launch, with attempts intensifying since the start of the most recent conflict. The organization also published a security report detailing an alleged attempt to compromise its domain name system.

Adding to these threats, multiple copycat domains mimicking the Mahsa Alert brand were all registered on the same single day in February — none of which had any connection to the legitimate platform. There are also reports of Iranian citizens being arrested for attempting to share war footage outside the country or for general online activity deemed threatening by authorities.

The Limits of Volunteer Power

For all its achievements, Mahsa Alert operates under significant constraints. The crowdsourced verification model, while rigorous, means the platform cannot offer anything close to real-time information. A backlog of thousands of unverified reports underscores the gap between what volunteers can process and what is actually happening on the ground.

Ahmadian is candid about the resource pressures the team faces. "I wish we had more resources; we have a lot of ideas," he says.

Yet the project stands alongside other landmark volunteer-driven conflict documentation efforts — including those that emerged from the Syrian civil war and Russia's invasion of Ukraine — as proof that crowdsourced tools can serve as meaningful historical records even when governments refuse to act.

A Tool Built to Make Itself Obsolete

Ahmadian's ultimate vision for Mahsa Alert is perhaps the most telling measure of why it exists in the first place. "Hopefully Mahsa Alert will someday become unnecessary to have," he says. "Then it could be transformed for other coordination or emergency alerts for the future of Iran."

Until that day, the platform remains a lifeline — imperfect, resource-stretched, and volunteer-driven, but operational in a country where the government has chosen silence over safety.