Comment by RIMR

The reports right now are that these were ordinary pagers and that some sort of software attack overloaded the batteries and caused them to explode.

But I work lithium batteries. I've overloaded lithium batteries before and let them explode for safety testing. The videos released of these things exploding on people doesn't look anything like what I would expect, especially not from something as small as a pager battery. You would need to seal lithium batteries in a metal tube or something to cause that kind of explosion.

I highly suspect that this was a supply chain attack, and that there's a high explosive charge hidden in these things, with some sort of radio backdoor that allows them to be detonated by whoever controls these things.