An error in testing for severe weather alerts, including a “significant threat to life”, caused these to go live and be sent out to people’s phones across the United Kingdom. The alerts warned of severe weather conditions for an array of different weather types in different parts of the country. These alerts were designed to be used by a third party aggregator, hence the test warnings were not meant to be made visible to the general public. The issue could have been caused during the aggregation process, the Met Office reports.
Many of the warnings told recipients to “take immediate action”, but managed to include a detailed message, which was to say these messages were for testing only. People noticed the warnings and sent them to friends and family, questioning why they had received such alarming alerts. A spokesperson for the Met Office suggested they were working on the problem, commenting: “we are aware of an issue where some test weather warnings were displaying on some websites and apps, we’ve worked with partners to ensure these test warnings have now been removed. We’re sorry for any inconvenience, there are, currently, no Met Office Severe Weather Warnings in force as of 14:00 Thursday 28 November.”
It is not yet known how many notifications were sent, and Apple users specifically can turn these on through their weather app manually. The United Kingdom has recently experienced stifling weather changes as Storm Bert caused unrest, leading to flooding, snowfall, and substantial wind gusts. The forecasters have indicated late afternoon and the evening could bring rain in different parts of the UK.
In comparison, the Department of Transportation (DOT) in the US experienced a similar issue when around a million notifications for earthquake warnings were sent in error. These warnings were caused by a repeated error activating twice following a test in Maryland that Sunday morning. The National Weather Service confirmed the alert was just a test and not anything to be concerned about.
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