People in Hawaii got an alert over their mobile phones that turned out to be wrong.
Omg pic.twitter.com/ZbDTL1rcaF
— Michelle Broder Van Dyke (@michellebvd) January 13, 2018
It was also on tv, and there are reports of sirens going off.
But it turns out that it seems to have been, uh, a drill.
PACOM in my Inbox: "USPACOM has detected no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii. Earlier message was sent in error. State of Hawaii will send out a correction message as soon as possible."
— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) January 13, 2018
HAWAII – THIS IS A FALSE ALARM. THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE TO HAWAII. I HAVE CONFIRMED WITH OFFICIALS THERE IS NO INCOMING MISSILE. pic.twitter.com/DxfTXIDOQs
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) January 13, 2018
NO missile threat to Hawaii.
— Hawaii EMA (@Hawaii_EMA) January 13, 2018
And then comes the commentary.
Who is being fired for mistakenly sending out an emergency alert of an incoming ICBM headed towards Hawaii? What if the President had been scrolling through Twitter and saw that?
We could all be dead by now because someone messed up and POTUS decided to Twitter-Order a response
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) January 13, 2018
This is for my friends in Hawaii.https://t.co/yTFZD1PdCF
— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) January 13, 2018
https://twitter.com/harries_matthew/status/952251376876351488
This happened in the pre-digital age, but social media changes things quite a bit: This Message from NORAD Announced Global Nuclear War—In 1971 https://t.co/jbN8dTmvsy
— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) January 13, 2018
I’ll update when I’ve got reliable information on what went wrong. I’m seeing several possibilities on my Twitter stream.
Meanwhile, open thread!