Emergency phone alert debacle deepens as users report being woken up in the middle of the night
- Thousands across the UK received their alerts either early, late or not at all
- Read more: ‘This is not a drill’: How emergency alert terrified an entire nation
The mobile phone alert fiasco deepened yesterday, with users being woken in the early hours.
The Government’s emergency alert system was supposed to send a test alarm to millions of smartphones across the UK at 3pm on Sunday.
But thousands received their alerts early, late, or not at all, with officials blaming the mobile phone network Three for the mix-up.
Other users were woken or disturbed by their phones beeping between midnight and 8am yesterday.
The early-hours alerts echoed a situation in Florida last week, when the state test of the alarm was sent to phones at 3am.
The Government’s emergency alert system was supposed to send a test alarm to smartphones across the UK at 3pm on Sunday
One social media user told how his phone network Three were sending out the alert in different phases
READ MORE: Brits deluge social media after receiving emergency alert on their phones one minute EARLY
Government officials had ruled out the prospect of such a blunder in the UK.
One smartphone user on a night bus posted a video of the alarm sounding, adding: ‘Emergency Test Alert disturbed my sleep while travelling from Cardiff to London after 3am.’
And the alerts continued to sound well into yesterday morning.
A Twitter user wrote: ‘This morn [Monday] @ 9am got the alert with siren, we [were] driving to Wales and at 11 am on Severn Bridge we got the siren again. Its a farce.’
Others also reported getting more than one alert, several hours apart.
The test-run included an error in its Welsh language version, using the word Vogel, which has no meaning in Welsh but is the name of a ski resort in Slovenia.
Tory MP David Jones said: ‘Bizarrely, a second emergency test has just sounded on all the phones in the train carriage I’m travelling in.
‘The Welsh text still spells ”ddiogel” as ”Vogel”, which I understand is a Slovenian ski resort and is getting quite a lot of free advertising.’
Another man wrote: ‘I got an emergency alert test again just over an hour ago. Am I the only one to get 2?’
An investigation is underway into the errors.
Another Three user on Twitter explained how they received no emergency alerts
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