Thank God the nation's mobile-phone towers are still operating, despite more than 1.7 million downloads of the latest iOS jailbreaking software – evasiOn – which was released days ago.

While trying to prevent federal regulators from legalizing jailbreaking, Apple had claimed the United States' mobile networks could suffer "potentially catastrophic" cyberattacks by iPhone-wielding hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners were permitted to legally jailbreak their shiny iDevices.

Fast forward to Monday: The Apocalypse never came, even though at times there were upward of 14,000 downloads a minute that day of the Cydia jailbreak app store that is automatically installed when an iOS device is jailbroken. In all, according to Jay Freeman, the operator of Cydia, there have been more than 1.7 million Cydia downloads following the much anticipated evasiOn release Monday.

Jailbreaking grants root access to a phone or tablet to run whatever apps the owner wishes, and not just those in Apple's app store.

The iOS jailbreak – available for free on Linux, Windows and OS X – is the first untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 5 and for Apple devices running iOS 6.x. It was developed by a team calling itself evad3rs, and the hack exploits five bugs in the iOS code.

Apple told the government in 2009 that the iPhone would become perhaps a dangerous weapon, where "a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data" – all of which could lead to "potentially catastrophic result."

Apple added that "the technological protection measures were designed into the iPhone precisely to prevent these kinds of pernicious activities, and if granted, the jailbreaking exemption would open the door to them."

Federal regulators called rubbish on the assertion, and have twice granted the public the right to jailbreak their mobile phones. Dozens of exploits have followed, and even existed on Android and iOS before they were legalized. All the while, mobile-phone towers went unscathed.