I was thinking of posting this in the What The thread but maybe it deserves its own thread: The simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah in Lebanon. This has resulted in nine deaths, hundreds of serious injuries and up to 3,000 wounded. Reuters story here.

At this stage all the news stories are concentrating on whodunit and the geopolitical effects. I do not want to raise a political discussion at all but I’m fascinated by how this was done - no news stories seem to be looking at this yet.

Possibiy the perpetrator somehow got doctored pagers with explosives inside into users' hands that were then remotely detonated. The logistics of doing this into enemy hands/territory are difficult to imagine.

Alternatively, the perpetrator could have found a way to send a signal or software that caused the pagers’ batteries to explode. This begs the question of how the perp got access to the pager network and was able to send to all pagers at the same time - maybe a disguised software update? Maybe they had access via an insider.

A reason that the explanation is important is that raises the possibility of bad actors doing this to any of the billions of mobile devices world-wide.