Why Your Phone Just Went off With an Emergency Alert

If your phone went off with an unfamiliar emergency alert on Wednesday, Oct. 4 at approximately 2:20 p.m. ET, there is nothing to be concerned about. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tested two emergency alert systems on Wednesday afternoon as a part of its routine maintenance. There is not a true national emergency at this time.

FEMA has developed an elaborate system to send a notification to nearly all cell phones in the U.S. known as the Wireless Emergency Alert, and this is the third time they have tested it. At the same time, the agency tested its Emergency Alert System – a similar method for broadcasting an emergency alert on all TVs and radios in the country. The broadcast alert should last for 30 minutes, while the one on mobile phones should only appear once, according to a report by CBS News. It should read: "THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed."

The Emergency Alert System was created in 2011 in the face of increasingly frequent national disasters, though there are many possible applications for these alerts. It and the Wireless Emergency Alert system utilize many smaller systems in coordination with the FCC under a mandate from FEMA. A researcher who has worked on these systems, Joseph Trainor, explained in an interview with CBS News.

"With the combination, you're going to catch a wide swath of people," Trainor said. "We know that they are effective systems. Like any system, there are strengths and weaknesses. How many characters you can use, how much you can transmit, how fast you can get it out. Every system has limits, and that's why we tell people, when we are giving advice about building warning systems, you don't ever want to rely on just one thing."

Cell phones will receive this emergency alert once when it first goes out, but the alert will last for 30 minutes on radio and TV. According to FEMA, cell phones will delay the alert if the user is on a call at the time. It also won't go through if the device is turned off or in airplane mode for the duration of the half-hour.

FEMA is required to test this alert system at least once every three years, and the last test was in 2021. Trainor explained: "If at some point the time comes that we need to put a wireless emergency alert to the entire nation, for some really serious, catastrophic event, the ability to send out messages in little places, smaller counties, smaller geographic areas, is not the same as having the capacity to distribute those messages across the entire system. So, one of the reasons that you might do something like this is to test the technological limits of the system, to make sure that it's available in that way."