The Internet Broke Emergency Alerts
America’s emergency notification systems were first built for war, and then rebuilt for peace. A false alarm in Hawaii shows that they didn’t anticipate how media works in the smartphone era.
It’s hard to imagine a worse way to be awoken on a Saturday morning in paradise than with a blaring Klaxon accompanying a government alert about an inbound ballistic-missile attack. But that’s exactly what happened to more than 1.5 million people in Hawaii this morning. “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII,” the emergency alert read, in all caps, on smartphones.… read more