So yeah, that happened. Last Saturday, a short-lived panic swept across the Hawaii (lately also known as a ”sh*tty country” thanks to the benevolent president Trump) when a country-wide warning of an inpending missile attack appeared on people’s phones. Thankfully the alert was false, and after fourty minutes of fearing for their lives, all Hawaiians have received a ”false alarm” notification. Phew.

So, what exacly went wrong? A pretty prosaic thing, really. According to The Washington Post, Hawaii emergency employee has initiated an internal emergency tool test. On a drop-down menu that appeared on his computer there were two commands; ”Test Missile Alert” and ”Missile Alert”. Poor girl/guy chose the latter while she/he was supposed to choose the former, and it is not even their fault. I mean, how hard it is to design a menu better? Have the options further away from one another, have them described, gosh, have an ”Are you sure?” window popping up after selecting an option – from what I hear, there were no such security/information measures put in this case. Thankfully, Hawaiian emergency team is now surely putting such measures in place.

Better late than never.