Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

FCC to investigate Hawaii’s erroneous missile warning

Mike Flacy
By

Hawaii
Sent in error on Saturday morning, the Hawaii Emergency Management agency issued a message around 8 a.m. local time that warned residents that a missile attack was imminent. Specifically, the message read “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”

As posted on social media, this alert message sent families scrambling to find shelter and overloaded cell phone networks as people attempted to find out more information about the attack. The Hawaii Emergency Management’s website crashed shortly after the message was sent, so political leaders in Hawaii attempted to use Twitter and other social platforms to inform the public that the alert was false.

Related Videos

“It’s totally unacceptable,” U.S. Senator Brian Schatz said. “There was anxiety across the state and it was terrifying. There was a lot of unnecessary pain and anxiety. It’s important to have accountability at the state level and the emergency management level in terms of what exactly what went wrong.” Schatz also indicated that the alert was due to human error.

US Pacific Command spokesperson Commander David Benham also released a statement which read “SPACOM 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.” Due to rising tensions between the United States and North Korea, this unfortunate error was likely taken very seriously by Hawaii residents.

The Federal Communications Commission has released a statement from chairman Ajit Pai regarding the incident. The chairman stated that the FCC is investigating the matter and is concerned that the state of Hawaii did not have “reasonable safeguards” in place to prevent such false alarms from occurring.

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) is a public safety system that lets the government geographically-target text messages to wireless devices. Only three types of alerts are allowed: alerts issued by the President, alerts involving imminent threats to safety or life, and amber alerts. These alerts often come with a specific phone vibration or loud noise to alert the user. Beyond the mobile alerts, the message played on televisions around the state, basically overriding the audio of the current channel.

Update: Updated to reflect the news that the FCC is investigating this incident. 

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
T-Mobile suffers massive data breach … again
The T-Mobile logo on a smartphone.

T-Mobile said on Thursday it has suffered a data breach involving 37 million customer accounts.

The mobile carrier discovered the breach on January 5 and took action “within 24 hours.”

Read more
Brits told not to mail anything abroad after cyber incident
Vivo V23 Pro photo of a post box.

The U.K.’s Royal Mail has told the nation’s 67 million citizens not to send anything overseas for the time being.

The seemingly odd request, by an organization whose business involves to some extent sending letters and parcels beyond its borders, is reportedly down to a cyber incident, the BBC reported.

Read more
Forget TikTok — it’s time to ban Twitter
Phil Nickinson's empty Twitter feed.

There are few sane headlines of late when it comes to social media. And if there are, they're probably about Facebook, which is just a sign of how weird things have gotten.

With the headline for this story, we manage to squeeze in both TikTok and Twitter. The platforms, to refer to them in the industry parlance, couldn't be more different, though we won't insult you as to try to describe them here. (If you really do need help, ask your kids. Don't have kids? Find one. They'll know TikTok. Need an explainer on Twitter? Ask a journalist, or your nearest bot farm.)

Read more