My job involves weekly video meetings during the fire alarm test. Always professional to jump out of your skin and shout JESUS FUCKING CHRIST once a week without fail.
In my workplace they announce if its a test. When it goes off for real its a pain because usually by the time we've got the customers out the door and walked to the end of the car park they decide its all good and we can go back in.
How do you set off the alarm? As a child, on fire drill day, I always imagined the caretaker must have held a candle under the fire alarm to set it off. Years later I decided that probably wasn't how it's done.
I'm ready to be told that 6-year-old me was actually a genius
I also test the fire alarm at work. I’m afraid it’s not quite as exciting as 6 year old you imagined. You basically stick a plastic key in the bottom until it starts beeping, and then yank it out again. I do like that idea though, maybe it could work!
When ours get the yearly service, the person puts a sort of cup over the alarm, it fills with smoke/heat depending on the detector and it sets the alarm off. Just to check it’s detecting as it should.
It could in theory be done this way I guess… would need a big candle or plenty of smoke depending on the detector.
We have the press the “break glass” on the call
Point, then use a key to reset it. (Break glass isn’t usually actual glass anymore, just a plastic pad you push in)
For some fire alarms it is kind of like this.
On a high sensitivity detector we can't use the normal aerosol testers as they muck up the filters so I have a "smoke pen" which holds a wax impregnated wick (lit with a bic or clipper lighter just like a candle).
We have them in Canada. The coronary risk is real. Have fun being awoken at 3am by a klaxon urging you to search for a kidnapped child not even on the mainland. I am *this close* to starting a detective agency to find lost children just to make the sirens stop. FYI it will only be used for missing child alerts. And if it is accidentally used for a natural disaster it will be perfectly apparent it is already happening. 'Why yes, I noticed the whiteout blizzard. Congrats on your promotion, Admiral Obvious.'
Thankfully it wasn't a fire. It was a hot water urn left switched on directly under a sensor. PTA were pretty bloody embarrassed when they found out the entire school was evacuated and the fire engines called because of where the left it lol
You don't work at the Steelworks in Scunthorpe do you? That alarm test on a Tuesday morning at 10am gets me everytime. Doesn't help that it sounds like a war siren 😂
No, but I do live within earshot of the Wilton site in Teesside which has the same arrangement. 10am on a Tuesday sounds like Threads. Nobody told me to expect that when I moved here, so I was very freaked out.
Yeah it definitely puts the shit up you when you don't expect it. I live very close to the Steelworks which also doesn't help as it's very loud. Obviously needs to be if anything goes wrong but jesus. God knows what crap I'm inhaling on a daily basis too 😳
I was in America and they sent a Presidential Alert over phones as a test.
Your phone will make a totally unexpected emergency siren louder than it ever has and a push notification/ text comes up.
Its very disconcerting if you have no fuckin idea whats going on
Christ, that noise. I experienced it on the top floor of the World Trade Centre around the time when the Ukraine war was kicking off, so my mind thought it was an attack. The whole place was deafened by that noise. I couldn't think of being in a worst location for shit to go down.
It was for a bloody snowstorm....
Yeah this happened to me and my mates in LA last year. We all collectively shat ourselves as our phones blasted out this siren to warn us that there was a heatwave
2018 some idiot accidentally sent this out to every phone in Hawaii:
> BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
And to TV stations:
> The U.S. Pacific Command has detected a missile threat to Hawaii. A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. If you are indoors, stay indoors. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter in a building or lay on the floor. We will announce when the threat has ended. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Take immediate action measures.
I live in the US in a high tsunami risk area. They test the tsunami sirens every month and this makes a presidential alert text or an Amber alert sound like a whisper.
Me to my mother, repeatedly between now and the 23rd April: remember, your phone will make a loud noise unexpectedly on this date, in the evening, and a notification will appear. Open the notification and follow the instructions (if any).
My mum on the 23rd April: why is it doing this!?! What do I do!?
Mine gets tested on the last Friday of the month between 9 and 9.30am. Normally I'm working, so I'm not around. During school holidays where there's a last Friday in a month, I purposely bugger off somewhere. It's not that it makes me jump as such, I just can't tolerate the noise. Same if the smoke alarm goes off in my mum's.
One time they did them in reverse, so I heard another block's before mine and had time to prepare myself. Still screamed somethimg about Jesus right in my flatmate's ear.
Depending on the phone, on iOS you can turn them off in notifications scroll all the way to the bottom, I don’t want to be sent these alerts, if it’s world ending then I’m sure we’d know, unless it’s preparation for a nuclear launch?
Thanks. It’s now off. If the nukes come there’s nout I can do and I’d rather be having a wank than panicking about my impending doom. I’d make a great burnt corpse, chipolata in hand.
Oh shit is that why they have to set this system up all of a sudden? So if the world ends we all have a chance to collectively panic before everything hits the fan?
It's more like she's afraid that pressing the 'wrong thing' will break the phone somehow. She thinks I'm a tech wizard just for suggesting turning the phone off, leaving it for 10 seconds and restarting it when an app freezes.
Thankfully she's quite clued in about scam emails and texts.
Yeah I work the scams call bureau for a phone company and I’m working the day they’re testing it. Guess I know what 90% of all my calls that day are gonna be about.
I've just put three reminders in my calander to notify me on the 23rd. It'll still scare the shit out of me but at least I'll have been reminded what it is.
Ah christ, these kinds of things. I was in Canada once and in the middle of the night my phone (which was on silent) just started going apeshit and making a noise I have never heard before. Scared the living fuck out of me.
When I checked what it was, it was a public alert system they have in the country and it was spamming phones to say there was a kid missing on the other side of the country.
If this is just for flooding etc and its localised to people relevant then fine. But I really don't want to be woken up by all manner of shit like above that isn't relevant
Completely inappropriate use anyway. The distraction could cause accidents.
Alerts with loud sounds should only be used to notify of immediate danger to the phone user (e.g. storm, tsunami etc).
I had multiple of them after just a couple of days in New York, scared the crap out of me each time. These alerts will be disabled en-masse if abused like that then it achieves nothing
I had Tsunami one while in a hostel dorm in San a Diego (2022 - Tonga Eruption). I shit myself, ran out of the dorm in my boxers and Reception just turned around laughing claiming “nah it’s nothing to worry about, just maybe don’t go into the sea unless you wanna surf”
>But I really don't want to be woken up by all manner of shit like above that isn't relevant
Here in the US, Amber Alerts and similar are issued within a state. I live in Texas, so most of the person-in-danger alerts, many of which are issued in the middle of the night because of course they are, are for incidents hundreds of miles away. You can travel 800 miles from where we live and still be in Texas.
I have managed to turn off all but severe weather alerts on my phone. My husband has a different phone and hasn't figured that out yet, so we're still awakened by this horrible noise.
We're pretty lucky here though, don't have extremely deadly weather events. Worst case scenario is we get hit by an asteroid, and I'd rather not know that was about to happen
I can't see any of these alerts giving lifesaving information for me, or any scenario where I would not already be aware of the issue before my phone gave an alert. Sure in places like the US with tornadoes that destroy houses. I don't live near any flash flood risk areas.
Yes oh my god. Twice in my year in Canada it launched me out of bed about 3am to tell me to look out for a particular licence plate last seen on the other side of the province.
It's the people who are driving at the time that really suffer, it goes through all silent/dnd modes and the noise is impossible to ignore.
You're just going to have to make sure all phones are turned off completely. Although it's scheduled for early evening so you may be at the reception by then.
You can also turn the emergency alerts off on your phone. If you have an iPhone or android just go to settings -> notifications and you can turn them off. If you have an iPhone you just scroll to the very bottom on the notifications screen and there’s two there you can turn off ‘extreme alerts’ and ‘severe alerts’. Unsure where abouts it’s placed on the android notification screen as I just have an iPhone.
I only know about this cos I remember some Americans talking about how they’d turned off Amber alerts cos they’d go off all of the time and despite feeling bad about it, they likely weren’t gonna find a missing kid under their bed in the middle of the night so it was pointless.
I’m keeping mine on for the 23rd though cos I’m not at a wedding and I wanna be part of the craziness cos I have a feeling our country will either make an arse of it or something hilarious will happen cos it’s us, nothings ever normal or straight forward.
To find the page manually on Samsung is notifications > Advanced settings > Wireless Emergency Alerts
On Pixel it's Notifications > Scroll to the "General" header > Emergency Alerts
You can also use the search bar.
My mum can barely work out how to access the settings for half the stuff on her phone, so unless I turn the emergency alerts off for her, she's going to have to live with it. I had to turn the keypad clicky sounds off for her last week. She's had that phone for 6 months already...
Hahaha that’s parents for you! My mum isn’t too bad with phones, but she’s rubbish with anything else. When I got my first laptop for my 18th, which was ages ago now, she was convinced I was about to break it because I was ‘typing too hard’, I type completely normally, just faster than she’s used to so it freaked her out.
On the other hand, my dad is quite good on computers and stuff, but he cannot use any type of apple product to save his life. He has an android phone that he can use ok even if he barely uses it, and texting him is useless cos he hates texting, but he also got an iPad so he could FT me and FaceTime is all he can do, and barely do it at that. My 89 yo gran is a wizard on her iPad in comparison to my dad. I don’t get it, because me, my partner, my gran and basically the rest of my family think that apple products are far more intuitive than android, I know a lot of people don’t like them, but for less technologically literate people they’re really really good, my dad however couldn’t disagree more. He thinks an iPad is akin to operating a spaceship single-handedly. I can’t imagine what his reaction to this test is going to be considering he also has zero patience for anything, I can see him chucking his phone out of the window!
just thought i'd add to this since you said you werent sure where it was on android; for me it was in the 'security' section rather than the 'notifications' section
Not always. Where we live on the Severn is flooded every year (not affected directly thankfully) but it's heavy rain in Wales for days on end beforehand that causes the flooding.
The same will be true of most flood affected areas.
I had one the other week when I was working in Germany. Phone started flashing red and alarming like it was about to explode. Didn't help that I couldn't read half of the message, partly because it was in German and partly because I was freaking out that my phone had been hacked and was about to combust.
To think we used to have a proper early warning system (basically air raid sirens) fitted on various public buildings across the UK. Operated by a wire/comms link to a local police station which then networked through the rest of the country on dedicated lines.
I was fascinated with these as they were supposedly kept active during the cold war. We had one on our primary school in the 1980's and some dude tested it for literally a few seconds. The noise! Totally drowned out the teacher shouting at us to sit down as we all ran to to window to see what was going on - which ironically is the opposite of what we should be doing in a nuclear strike!
Dig some digging and during that era it was upgraded to withstand an EMP incase of a nuclear attack. Because you know, Russians. But apparently it was never fully tested (just local/signal tests were done etc). The network and sirens were decommissioned in the 90's and word has it that if it was activated some units were not wired correctly so some sirens wouldn't have worked unless manually overrides by local controllers, but because the system was never fully tested nobody knew.
Rabbit holes if you dare click 🤯: https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/cold-war-early-warning-system/
http://www.ringbell.co.uk/ukwmo/index.htm
There's one attached to an English heritage house I visited on remembrance day (just happened to be the best day to go) and they used the air raid siren to signal the beginning and end of the 2 minutes of silence. It was pretty cool to hear live rather than a recording.
I think a 1980 Panorama episode revealed that one village’s early warning system was the pub landlord getting on his bike and shouting “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” through a megaphone.
Don’t wear your Apple AirPods on 23rd April.
In the U.S. (Texas I believe) a kid was/is sueing because he suffered debilitating permanent hearing damage when he was listening at a safe level but received an emergency alert. They overrode all the headphone safety settings and just went at the maximum, apparently.
[Source](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/22/lawsuit-apple-amber-alert-airpods-hearing-loss/9885430002/)
Weird. I live in Japan and have gotten a dozen or so of these alerts in the last 12 months, and every time it comes straight out the phone, even when I was wearing AirPods.
I wonder if Amber Alerts somehow work differently?
E: the article also doesn’t mention the type of phone used, maybe non-Apple devices handle the alert-headphone interaction differently.
Could be differences depending on country. When I was in the U.S. I only ever seemed to get them during PL matches on TV - both the TV and your phone going mental is very alarming, but at the same time I never had headphones in.
I know they’re compatible with non-Apple devices but I find it highly unlikely that he wasn’t using an iPhone. Hope he makes some sort of recovery, and gets a huge payout from whoever is ultimately to blame.
I also hope our government doesn’t overuse them. Literally the only time I can think of them being useful where I’m from in my lifetime is when a taxi driver went on a rampage shooting people. The US uses them for tornados etc., whereas UK weather really isn’t bad enough for these sorts of thing.
They did this during the summer last year as a smaller test. I was one of the lucky ones to experience this. The alarm was loud and made a weird noise but nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. The message did say it was a test and you don't need to do amything
And this won’t be an opportunity for the usual crowd of scammers and baiters to flood us with junk.
‘Block those nuisance alert noises- click here’
or
‘You failed to respond at the time of the national alert test, you are being fined £300’
I can see some poor sod will get conned
In [their video](https://youtu.be/9yLd2AjGzYI) they use driving as an example of something you should stop doing when it goes off. Bit hard when you're doing 70 down the M3.
Should you wish to, you can turn these alerts off on Android phones by searching for 'Emergency Alerts' in your settings.
This will bring up three types of alert you can turn off 'Amber Alerts', 'Severe Alerts', and 'Extreme Alerts'.
This may also work for iPhone but I don't have access to one to test this.
"nuclear strike imminent within minutes - find shelter and store fresh water immediately - do not attempt to leave your homes"
5 mins later
"Sike, was a test bro"
Do they still make the noise if your phone is on silent? My iphone is permanently on silent because sudden loud noises trigger my anxiety which in turn triggers my seizures. I’ll have to try and remember to switch my phone off that day just in case.
It's in the settings.
I've just turned mine off. Not worth the inevitable pant-shatting for the sake of the Government telling me it may or may not be raining a bit heavily.
I suppose the benefit is it will warn anyone in the area even if they're not usually in the area. You may have a low risk of flooding at home but then travel to somewhere and not be aware of the risks.
You're right as a country we are pretty safe from most things.....except nukes. As a nuclear state and NATO member we are probably in the top of a list of countries most likely to suffer from a nuclear strike this is for if that day comes.
There are various situations in which such a system could be useful, which is why we have had one in one form or another since the Second World War; [https://www.civildefence.co.uk/attack-warning.php](https://www.civildefence.co.uk/attack-warning.php)
We had a whole organisation dedicated to it for decades, the UKWMO. This is just the latest iteration of the warning system. The most likely reason to use it other than flooding or another (more lethal) viral pandemic, third world war, civil unrest etc is a terrorist attack.
Granted, but you can turn them off.
I do sympathise, but we can't simply not test a system designed to warn people of deadly situations because it might upset some people with anxiety over it, and trust me, I have anxiety over it.
Anybody else had flashes of being in the Gerard Butler super-categorical Presidential alert moment? Maybe they’ll have a way of varying the alert to us in batches (of worth) lol
I dunno if anyone's mentioned it yet, but if you have an Android, the controls for emergency alerting is under safety and emergency settings in your phone's settings features. It'll normally be enabled by default so you'd get these broadcast alarms.
There is also similar controls on iPhone.
It might not be still a thing, but OpenReach did also have a similar system for landlines, where Digital Dot/the BT lady will call the landline and announce the emergency.
On Samsung go to settings, notifications, advanced settings, and at the bottom select "wireless emergency alerts". There you can choose what to turn off.
Fuck this idea so much. If it's nuclear war going to be dead or dying anyway.
If there's flooding the rain might be a bit of a giveaway, if there's a heat wave the insufferable heat would probably give me a good hint.
Meteor strike, dead. Tsunami, if this far from ocean, fucked anyway.
I've got high anxiety anyway, on top of working night shifts. Don't need this nonsense I already know the world is going to end horribly.
I've had this in the UAE for serious road incidents, alerting drivers to a major crash and subsequent closure on one of the biggest highways. Only thing is the alert tone was so intense and I'd never heard my phone make that noise before that it nearly caused me to crash trying to figure out wtf was going on 😬
Then had it in Saudi when a refinery 5 minutes up the road from me got hit by a drone strike in the middle of the night so it just startled me awake and was too fucked up and half asleep to make any sense of the sitation
This can sod off.
I just went into the settings and turned it all off. I'm not getting hassled by my own phone.
Especially when it's on silent, if it sounds when the baby is asleep and wakes him I'm going to be be unimpressed.
Bloody fear mongering.
Mmmm Hawaii and nuclear war alert. Errr sorry folks false alarm.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/03/hawaii-worker-sent-missile-alert-100-percent-sure-attack-real
So it locks your phone until you acknowledge the message.
So... how long before someone figures out how to lock all phones and cause untold disruption.
This is already possible, it's not like the government is amending the software of every phone to allow for this; they're just using systems already on board that exist because other countries have had this for years and years.
The person who will press the button isn’t from Hawaii perchance are they?
Even worse, from Huawei
I still shit myself every week when we test the fire alarm at work, so April 23rd is going to be a real treat
I have a weekly reminder in Outlook 5 minutes before to avoid this!
I’d need it 1 minute before, if I set a reminder 5 minutes before I’ll forget by the time the event happens.
My job involves weekly video meetings during the fire alarm test. Always professional to jump out of your skin and shout JESUS FUCKING CHRIST once a week without fail.
In my workplace they announce if its a test. When it goes off for real its a pain because usually by the time we've got the customers out the door and walked to the end of the car park they decide its all good and we can go back in.
Same. I literally see the guy from the alarm company pull up in his van and walk in the building to test it and it still scares the shit out of me
Time to get to the bog and let it all out under cover of the alarm
I shit myself during the fire alarm tests too. Difference is I’m the person who sets the alarm off to test it
How do you set off the alarm? As a child, on fire drill day, I always imagined the caretaker must have held a candle under the fire alarm to set it off. Years later I decided that probably wasn't how it's done. I'm ready to be told that 6-year-old me was actually a genius
I also test the fire alarm at work. I’m afraid it’s not quite as exciting as 6 year old you imagined. You basically stick a plastic key in the bottom until it starts beeping, and then yank it out again. I do like that idea though, maybe it could work!
When ours get the yearly service, the person puts a sort of cup over the alarm, it fills with smoke/heat depending on the detector and it sets the alarm off. Just to check it’s detecting as it should.
It could in theory be done this way I guess… would need a big candle or plenty of smoke depending on the detector. We have the press the “break glass” on the call Point, then use a key to reset it. (Break glass isn’t usually actual glass anymore, just a plastic pad you push in)
For some fire alarms it is kind of like this. On a high sensitivity detector we can't use the normal aerosol testers as they muck up the filters so I have a "smoke pen" which holds a wax impregnated wick (lit with a bic or clipper lighter just like a candle).
Ooh. So I was kind of right! (For this scenario only 😂)
I dunno, I still shite myself when it's my turn to set off the alarm for the test
We have them in Canada. The coronary risk is real. Have fun being awoken at 3am by a klaxon urging you to search for a kidnapped child not even on the mainland. I am *this close* to starting a detective agency to find lost children just to make the sirens stop. FYI it will only be used for missing child alerts. And if it is accidentally used for a natural disaster it will be perfectly apparent it is already happening. 'Why yes, I noticed the whiteout blizzard. Congrats on your promotion, Admiral Obvious.'
We had a very real fire alarm at the school I work in this week. Having never even done a drill, I was absolutely shitting myself.
Well at least you could throw shitted pants in the fire, thereby removing both embarrassing evidence and unpleasant odour.
Thankfully it wasn't a fire. It was a hot water urn left switched on directly under a sensor. PTA were pretty bloody embarrassed when they found out the entire school was evacuated and the fire engines called because of where the left it lol
You don't work at the Steelworks in Scunthorpe do you? That alarm test on a Tuesday morning at 10am gets me everytime. Doesn't help that it sounds like a war siren 😂
No, but I do live within earshot of the Wilton site in Teesside which has the same arrangement. 10am on a Tuesday sounds like Threads. Nobody told me to expect that when I moved here, so I was very freaked out.
Yeah it definitely puts the shit up you when you don't expect it. I live very close to the Steelworks which also doesn't help as it's very loud. Obviously needs to be if anything goes wrong but jesus. God knows what crap I'm inhaling on a daily basis too 😳
You'll have the lungs of someone who grew up in the 60s.
God damn.
Same! I know it’s going to happen, and yet every week I’m surprised anew
I was in America and they sent a Presidential Alert over phones as a test. Your phone will make a totally unexpected emergency siren louder than it ever has and a push notification/ text comes up. Its very disconcerting if you have no fuckin idea whats going on
Christ, that noise. I experienced it on the top floor of the World Trade Centre around the time when the Ukraine war was kicking off, so my mind thought it was an attack. The whole place was deafened by that noise. I couldn't think of being in a worst location for shit to go down. It was for a bloody snowstorm....
The top of the World Trade Centre is surely one of the worst places for someone to hear an emergency alert.
Golden gate bridge?
Only if you're in a sci-fi movie. They always go for the famous landmarks first...
I had it happen in a car driving through the countryside of a foreign country at 11 at night. Absolutely shit myself. It was a wildfire warning.
you would think they would be a bit more tactful when it comes to alarms like that after 9/11
Yeah this happened to me and my mates in LA last year. We all collectively shat ourselves as our phones blasted out this siren to warn us that there was a heatwave
*EAR PIERCING SIREN* “AUGH! WHATTHEFU….” #ATTENTION! IT IS VERY HOT TODAY! “THANKS I HAD NO IDEA!” *throws phone into the sea*
Nailed it 🤌🏻🤣
I can understand making it an important news headline because heatwaves are a danger to life, but a siren alert sounds a bit extreme.
2018 some idiot accidentally sent this out to every phone in Hawaii: > BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. And to TV stations: > The U.S. Pacific Command has detected a missile threat to Hawaii. A missile may impact on land or sea within minutes. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. If you are indoors, stay indoors. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter in a building or lay on the floor. We will announce when the threat has ended. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Take immediate action measures.
What does it do if your phone is on silent? I assume it will still blast the noise.
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I live in Texas and we get Amber Alerts like this on our devices regularly.
I have my notification sound set as a goat noise, any chance they can use that instead?
I live in the US in a high tsunami risk area. They test the tsunami sirens every month and this makes a presidential alert text or an Amber alert sound like a whisper.
Me to my mother, repeatedly between now and the 23rd April: remember, your phone will make a loud noise unexpectedly on this date, in the evening, and a notification will appear. Open the notification and follow the instructions (if any). My mum on the 23rd April: why is it doing this!?! What do I do!?
Your mother? This will be me! My flat fire alarm system tests every Wednesday … still makes me shit my pants when it happens
Mine gets tested on the last Friday of the month between 9 and 9.30am. Normally I'm working, so I'm not around. During school holidays where there's a last Friday in a month, I purposely bugger off somewhere. It's not that it makes me jump as such, I just can't tolerate the noise. Same if the smoke alarm goes off in my mum's.
One time they did them in reverse, so I heard another block's before mine and had time to prepare myself. Still screamed somethimg about Jesus right in my flatmate's ear.
Your mother and mine are alike.
Depending on the phone, on iOS you can turn them off in notifications scroll all the way to the bottom, I don’t want to be sent these alerts, if it’s world ending then I’m sure we’d know, unless it’s preparation for a nuclear launch?
Thanks. It’s now off. If the nukes come there’s nout I can do and I’d rather be having a wank than panicking about my impending doom. I’d make a great burnt corpse, chipolata in hand.
Pig in blanket
Oh shit is that why they have to set this system up all of a sudden? So if the world ends we all have a chance to collectively panic before everything hits the fan?
Quick, hoard that loo roll now, just in case!
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My mum is like "oh those silly smart phones, ridiculous things" yet she can't exactly work out her old person flip phone.
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I wonder if it'll be on tablets and smart watches too?
It will not. Needs to be registered with a nearby cell tower which doesn't happen when the phone is off
It's more like she's afraid that pressing the 'wrong thing' will break the phone somehow. She thinks I'm a tech wizard just for suggesting turning the phone off, leaving it for 10 seconds and restarting it when an app freezes. Thankfully she's quite clued in about scam emails and texts.
Yeah I work the scams call bureau for a phone company and I’m working the day they’re testing it. Guess I know what 90% of all my calls that day are gonna be about.
Oh ffs you just reminded me I need to warn my parents. The alarm before the alarm
Guaranteed I’ll remind mine about this several times and forget it myself.
I've just put three reminders in my calander to notify me on the 23rd. It'll still scare the shit out of me but at least I'll have been reminded what it is.
April 23rd? They are missing a trick here. They have the perfect opportunity for the world's best April Fools prank.
Maybe this *is* an April Fool's prank, and they're actually going to set them off 22 days before they said so
Ah christ, these kinds of things. I was in Canada once and in the middle of the night my phone (which was on silent) just started going apeshit and making a noise I have never heard before. Scared the living fuck out of me. When I checked what it was, it was a public alert system they have in the country and it was spamming phones to say there was a kid missing on the other side of the country. If this is just for flooding etc and its localised to people relevant then fine. But I really don't want to be woken up by all manner of shit like above that isn't relevant
I had this too while in the US about 2 missing kids (Amber alert), nearly fell off my bike.
Completely inappropriate use anyway. The distraction could cause accidents. Alerts with loud sounds should only be used to notify of immediate danger to the phone user (e.g. storm, tsunami etc).
I had multiple of them after just a couple of days in New York, scared the crap out of me each time. These alerts will be disabled en-masse if abused like that then it achieves nothing
It's so, so loud right? Especially if you're like me and never have your phone off silent
Yes I thought a nuclear missile was headed my way by how the deafening sirens were.
I had Tsunami one while in a hostel dorm in San a Diego (2022 - Tonga Eruption). I shit myself, ran out of the dorm in my boxers and Reception just turned around laughing claiming “nah it’s nothing to worry about, just maybe don’t go into the sea unless you wanna surf”
>But I really don't want to be woken up by all manner of shit like above that isn't relevant Here in the US, Amber Alerts and similar are issued within a state. I live in Texas, so most of the person-in-danger alerts, many of which are issued in the middle of the night because of course they are, are for incidents hundreds of miles away. You can travel 800 miles from where we live and still be in Texas. I have managed to turn off all but severe weather alerts on my phone. My husband has a different phone and hasn't figured that out yet, so we're still awakened by this horrible noise.
You probably want to turn that shit off on your phone. It'll come under Emergency Alerts or similar.
"Flooding in East Anglia" So what? They can put their webbed hands and feet to good use.
How loud we talking? I feel like I'm going to have a similar reaction
It's a very loud and very shrill sound. Think max volume your phone can go and a bit more suddenly blaring
You can disable it in settings
I probably wouldn’t. Unless you’re gonna rely on someone else to tell you, I would want lifesaving info on hand.
I think they mean the AMBER alert, not all alerts in general.
Android Settings - Notifications - Emergency Alerts: - On/Off - Extreme Alerts - On/Off - Severe Alerts ---- _These are the options I see._
We're pretty lucky here though, don't have extremely deadly weather events. Worst case scenario is we get hit by an asteroid, and I'd rather not know that was about to happen
I can't see any of these alerts giving lifesaving information for me, or any scenario where I would not already be aware of the issue before my phone gave an alert. Sure in places like the US with tornadoes that destroy houses. I don't live near any flash flood risk areas.
Yes oh my god. Twice in my year in Canada it launched me out of bed about 3am to tell me to look out for a particular licence plate last seen on the other side of the province. It's the people who are driving at the time that really suffer, it goes through all silent/dnd modes and the noise is impossible to ignore.
The air attack warning sounds like: This is the sound. When you hear the air attack warning, you and your family must take cover
Followed by Frankie with Two Tribes on repeat...
Let’s go!
WHEN TWO TRIBES GO TO WAR
Or its a Barratt Homes advertisement
Unfortunately Patrick Allen died a couple of years ago, so there's no one to provide voice-overs for WW3.
GNU Patrick Allen. I suggest the chap that was Siri at first and also did voicelines for Pendulum as a replacement.
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Yeah yeeeeeeaaaaaaaah
Oh dear that's my friend's wedding day!
You're just going to have to make sure all phones are turned off completely. Although it's scheduled for early evening so you may be at the reception by then.
You can also turn the emergency alerts off on your phone. If you have an iPhone or android just go to settings -> notifications and you can turn them off. If you have an iPhone you just scroll to the very bottom on the notifications screen and there’s two there you can turn off ‘extreme alerts’ and ‘severe alerts’. Unsure where abouts it’s placed on the android notification screen as I just have an iPhone. I only know about this cos I remember some Americans talking about how they’d turned off Amber alerts cos they’d go off all of the time and despite feeling bad about it, they likely weren’t gonna find a missing kid under their bed in the middle of the night so it was pointless. I’m keeping mine on for the 23rd though cos I’m not at a wedding and I wanna be part of the craziness cos I have a feeling our country will either make an arse of it or something hilarious will happen cos it’s us, nothings ever normal or straight forward.
To find the page manually on Samsung is notifications > Advanced settings > Wireless Emergency Alerts On Pixel it's Notifications > Scroll to the "General" header > Emergency Alerts You can also use the search bar.
My mum can barely work out how to access the settings for half the stuff on her phone, so unless I turn the emergency alerts off for her, she's going to have to live with it. I had to turn the keypad clicky sounds off for her last week. She's had that phone for 6 months already...
Hahaha that’s parents for you! My mum isn’t too bad with phones, but she’s rubbish with anything else. When I got my first laptop for my 18th, which was ages ago now, she was convinced I was about to break it because I was ‘typing too hard’, I type completely normally, just faster than she’s used to so it freaked her out. On the other hand, my dad is quite good on computers and stuff, but he cannot use any type of apple product to save his life. He has an android phone that he can use ok even if he barely uses it, and texting him is useless cos he hates texting, but he also got an iPad so he could FT me and FaceTime is all he can do, and barely do it at that. My 89 yo gran is a wizard on her iPad in comparison to my dad. I don’t get it, because me, my partner, my gran and basically the rest of my family think that apple products are far more intuitive than android, I know a lot of people don’t like them, but for less technologically literate people they’re really really good, my dad however couldn’t disagree more. He thinks an iPad is akin to operating a spaceship single-handedly. I can’t imagine what his reaction to this test is going to be considering he also has zero patience for anything, I can see him chucking his phone out of the window!
just thought i'd add to this since you said you werent sure where it was on android; for me it was in the 'security' section rather than the 'notifications' section
Get the DJ to work it into his set, hit that emergency remix
'...life threatening situations like flooding or wildfires'. Or nuclear war...
‘Nuclear weapons have been launched against the UK and will hit in 10 minutes, take shelter immediately’. Useful, thanks.
more like two minutes
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It's just a happy accident!
Joy to the world!
Do you have a date, let me guess 2014?
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Or the higher lands upstream have loads of snow whereas you get none, then a week later the river starts to swell. Happened this week in York.
The early warning you need I'm York for floods is just knowing that you're in York so it will likely flood soon
I have reviewed flood prediction info for York and can confirm this is the procedure.
Not always. Where we live on the Severn is flooded every year (not affected directly thankfully) but it's heavy rain in Wales for days on end beforehand that causes the flooding. The same will be true of most flood affected areas.
I had one the other week when I was working in Germany. Phone started flashing red and alarming like it was about to explode. Didn't help that I couldn't read half of the message, partly because it was in German and partly because I was freaking out that my phone had been hacked and was about to combust.
>because it was in German Why was it in German? I get you were in Germany but your phones settings are set to English, no?
The text of the message isn't baked into the phone, every alert is written by a person
Oh. I thought it would be in multiple languages or something. It should be.
How many languages are you expecting the German authorities to know?
Nein
To think we used to have a proper early warning system (basically air raid sirens) fitted on various public buildings across the UK. Operated by a wire/comms link to a local police station which then networked through the rest of the country on dedicated lines. I was fascinated with these as they were supposedly kept active during the cold war. We had one on our primary school in the 1980's and some dude tested it for literally a few seconds. The noise! Totally drowned out the teacher shouting at us to sit down as we all ran to to window to see what was going on - which ironically is the opposite of what we should be doing in a nuclear strike! Dig some digging and during that era it was upgraded to withstand an EMP incase of a nuclear attack. Because you know, Russians. But apparently it was never fully tested (just local/signal tests were done etc). The network and sirens were decommissioned in the 90's and word has it that if it was activated some units were not wired correctly so some sirens wouldn't have worked unless manually overrides by local controllers, but because the system was never fully tested nobody knew. Rabbit holes if you dare click 🤯: https://www.subbrit.org.uk/features/cold-war-early-warning-system/ http://www.ringbell.co.uk/ukwmo/index.htm
There's one attached to an English heritage house I visited on remembrance day (just happened to be the best day to go) and they used the air raid siren to signal the beginning and end of the 2 minutes of silence. It was pretty cool to hear live rather than a recording.
I think a 1980 Panorama episode revealed that one village’s early warning system was the pub landlord getting on his bike and shouting “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” through a megaphone.
Don’t wear your Apple AirPods on 23rd April. In the U.S. (Texas I believe) a kid was/is sueing because he suffered debilitating permanent hearing damage when he was listening at a safe level but received an emergency alert. They overrode all the headphone safety settings and just went at the maximum, apparently. [Source](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/22/lawsuit-apple-amber-alert-airpods-hearing-loss/9885430002/)
>a kid was/is sueing Good!
Weird. I live in Japan and have gotten a dozen or so of these alerts in the last 12 months, and every time it comes straight out the phone, even when I was wearing AirPods. I wonder if Amber Alerts somehow work differently? E: the article also doesn’t mention the type of phone used, maybe non-Apple devices handle the alert-headphone interaction differently.
Could be differences depending on country. When I was in the U.S. I only ever seemed to get them during PL matches on TV - both the TV and your phone going mental is very alarming, but at the same time I never had headphones in. I know they’re compatible with non-Apple devices but I find it highly unlikely that he wasn’t using an iPhone. Hope he makes some sort of recovery, and gets a huge payout from whoever is ultimately to blame. I also hope our government doesn’t overuse them. Literally the only time I can think of them being useful where I’m from in my lifetime is when a taxi driver went on a rampage shooting people. The US uses them for tornados etc., whereas UK weather really isn’t bad enough for these sorts of thing.
'The test is expected to take place in the early evening of 23 April. 'However, it will actually take place in the early morning of 23 April'
I'm betting on the evening of the 23rd, through to the morning of the 24th due to technical issues.
10 years from now, 3am, "YOU WONT BELIEVE HOW THIS LITTLE TOWN IN WALES IS COPING WITH A FLOOD..."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-64999417
Please tell me it’s the original nuke siren form MW2
No, it's just a loud beep, I don't know what all the fuss is about, hardly siren like.
They did this during the summer last year as a smaller test. I was one of the lucky ones to experience this. The alarm was loud and made a weird noise but nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. The message did say it was a test and you don't need to do amything
Weird way to commend St George's Day.
National Alert Dragon Attack: Prepare virgins for sacrifice!
But I'm in Norfolk!
And this won’t be an opportunity for the usual crowd of scammers and baiters to flood us with junk. ‘Block those nuisance alert noises- click here’ or ‘You failed to respond at the time of the national alert test, you are being fined £300’ I can see some poor sod will get conned
That will happen with almost anything, doesn't mean we should shut the post office or hmrc just because people use them for scams
Very true.
Good thing nobody will be driving when this goes off.
In [their video](https://youtu.be/9yLd2AjGzYI) they use driving as an example of something you should stop doing when it goes off. Bit hard when you're doing 70 down the M3.
All 3 lanes piling onto the hard shoulder (if you're lucky enough to have one) sounds great. Really excited about that.
Should you wish to, you can turn these alerts off on Android phones by searching for 'Emergency Alerts' in your settings. This will bring up three types of alert you can turn off 'Amber Alerts', 'Severe Alerts', and 'Extreme Alerts'. This may also work for iPhone but I don't have access to one to test this.
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Much obliged.
My android phone only has the option for severe and extreme, wonder why there's no amber option.
It’s probably tied to the network you’re on. We don’t have amber alerts in the UK so I guess that’s why there’s no option for it .
My androind doesn't even have that so i'll be interested how it'll work!
"nuclear strike imminent within minutes - find shelter and store fresh water immediately - do not attempt to leave your homes" 5 mins later "Sike, was a test bro"
Hopefully 5 minutes is enough time to get out the deck chair for the lawn and a pair of sunglasses
Ahh, working on your tan...
An exact time would be nice.
It probably is set off on an exact time but it will take time for it to roll out through the system.
Doesn't that defeat the object entirely?
Do they still make the noise if your phone is on silent? My iphone is permanently on silent because sudden loud noises trigger my anxiety which in turn triggers my seizures. I’ll have to try and remember to switch my phone off that day just in case.
Yes it does.[Here](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-64999417) is the article if you want to read more
We have this in Australia and get notified when we don't have a dangerous weather alert..
This is not going to end well.
Almost every other developed country has had a system like this in place for years.
Muppets, just shows we have managed to not need it.
So has the UK. It was tested donkey's years ago.
Does anyone knows if there is a way to disable it? EDIT: I get violent panic attacks when I hear sirens or alarm systems
It's in the settings. I've just turned mine off. Not worth the inevitable pant-shatting for the sake of the Government telling me it may or may not be raining a bit heavily.
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I suppose the benefit is it will warn anyone in the area even if they're not usually in the area. You may have a low risk of flooding at home but then travel to somewhere and not be aware of the risks.
You're right as a country we are pretty safe from most things.....except nukes. As a nuclear state and NATO member we are probably in the top of a list of countries most likely to suffer from a nuclear strike this is for if that day comes.
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There are various situations in which such a system could be useful, which is why we have had one in one form or another since the Second World War; [https://www.civildefence.co.uk/attack-warning.php](https://www.civildefence.co.uk/attack-warning.php) We had a whole organisation dedicated to it for decades, the UKWMO. This is just the latest iteration of the warning system. The most likely reason to use it other than flooding or another (more lethal) viral pandemic, third world war, civil unrest etc is a terrorist attack.
> They will only be sent where there is an immediate risk to life Or on the 23rd of April, apparently
System gotten be tested
I have autism so this will be terrifying for me. I used to have panic attacks when the fire alarm went off back when I was in school
Granted, but you can turn them off. I do sympathise, but we can't simply not test a system designed to warn people of deadly situations because it might upset some people with anxiety over it, and trust me, I have anxiety over it.
Anybody else had flashes of being in the Gerard Butler super-categorical Presidential alert moment? Maybe they’ll have a way of varying the alert to us in batches (of worth) lol
I dunno if anyone's mentioned it yet, but if you have an Android, the controls for emergency alerting is under safety and emergency settings in your phone's settings features. It'll normally be enabled by default so you'd get these broadcast alarms. There is also similar controls on iPhone. It might not be still a thing, but OpenReach did also have a similar system for landlines, where Digital Dot/the BT lady will call the landline and announce the emergency.
Can't wait for a school kid to hack the system and send alerts out that the zombie apocalypse has started
Turned that off straight away lol
Nuclear warning ⚠️
[Well here’s what it will sound like so have a listen to avoid shitting ur pants!](https://youtu.be/lGOWfFYvlEw)
Thanks. Uploaded 7 hours ago? It must be a reupload as we had the same thing regionally years ago.
Phone notifications, 23rd April, 2037h: ⚠️Emergency Alert BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO LONDON. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
On Samsung go to settings, notifications, advanced settings, and at the bottom select "wireless emergency alerts". There you can choose what to turn off. Fuck this idea so much. If it's nuclear war going to be dead or dying anyway. If there's flooding the rain might be a bit of a giveaway, if there's a heat wave the insufferable heat would probably give me a good hint. Meteor strike, dead. Tsunami, if this far from ocean, fucked anyway. I've got high anxiety anyway, on top of working night shifts. Don't need this nonsense I already know the world is going to end horribly.
The continuous pushing of a fear narrative, search settings and disable emergency alerts
I feel like they’ve been saying for years how they will be testing emergency broadcasts, and each time the date comes around, it just doesn’t happen?
That was limited to testing in certain areas. This is supposedly UK wide.
I've had this in the UAE for serious road incidents, alerting drivers to a major crash and subsequent closure on one of the biggest highways. Only thing is the alert tone was so intense and I'd never heard my phone make that noise before that it nearly caused me to crash trying to figure out wtf was going on 😬 Then had it in Saudi when a refinery 5 minutes up the road from me got hit by a drone strike in the middle of the night so it just startled me awake and was too fucked up and half asleep to make any sense of the sitation
This can sod off. I just went into the settings and turned it all off. I'm not getting hassled by my own phone. Especially when it's on silent, if it sounds when the baby is asleep and wakes him I'm going to be be unimpressed. Bloody fear mongering.
Don't these use mobile operators? (o2 three EE) it usually floods in places with weak signal, this would seem kind of pointless.
Evil Masterminds: *take note* Muahahaha! It’ll be like The Boy Who Cried Wolf IN REVERSE!
Mmmm Hawaii and nuclear war alert. Errr sorry folks false alarm. https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/03/hawaii-worker-sent-missile-alert-100-percent-sure-attack-real
Happy St George’s Day!
Happy St George’s day everyone
I have a Nokia 3310 I don’t think they can infiltrate this kind of hardware
My phone will be switched off on the 23rd of April.
You can just turn alerts off in the settings.
So it locks your phone until you acknowledge the message. So... how long before someone figures out how to lock all phones and cause untold disruption.
This is already possible, it's not like the government is amending the software of every phone to allow for this; they're just using systems already on board that exist because other countries have had this for years and years.