Hawaii's Fake Missile Alert. Crisis Comms Case Study/Analysis

Hawaii's Fake Missile Alert
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Hawaii's Fake Missile Alert
January 13, 2018, at around 8:10 am on Saturday, as occupants and tourists in Hawaii were planning to start their day, phones start sounding off. The alarm message was reading, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAI SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Upon getting this alert, people started to panic. Around 15 minutes, government officials informed individuals through social media that the alert was a false alarm. The Center for Disease and Prevention CDC confirmed that residents were frightened when they were notified that a ballistic missile was plunging toward Hawaii. But when they realized that the alarm was fake, they were outraged. Although it was a mistake, the alert showed that people are not prepared for any attack and state health executives require to improve their messaging. Hawaii executives effectively nullified the message four minutes after it was sent, which prohibited its retransmission over digital media. CDC came into a decision after studying related social media reactions during the 38-minute before the alert was withdrawn (Medema, et al 2018). The Hawaii worker who spread the false alarm warning had essentially been fired.
Executives also suggested that the naughty January 13 alert that sent signals of terror in the Hawaiian island was not the first time such a mix-up happened for the worker. Twice before that false alarm, the worker had confused real-life actions and drills. Later, the State investigation discovered that the worker understood that there was “an actual disaster, not a drill.” That challenges previous explanation from Hawaii executives, who suggested that the alarm was sent when the worker unintentionally pressed the incorrect button on a computer. (Hollingsworth et al . 2019). A federal investigation indicated that the emergency information was followed by a long time of confusion, during which officials didn’t directly recognize the correct alert although they identified it was false, leaving people confused that there was no actual emergency ongoing.
The worker who hit the alarm hence sending out the alert was fired but was not identified publicly. Federal officials suggested that his identification was released when some disciplinary requests are complete. It was not open whether the worker challenged his firing or challenged the public account of what took place. The federal investigation termed the worker caused the alert as having a rich background at the agency, and other members of the staff suggested that they felt unc...