Weather warnings, erroneously indicating a “significant threat to life”, were broadcast on smartphones across the UK, despite nothing unusual occurring. This is obviously an error, confirmed by the Met Office. In France, there have already been precedents with the FR-ALERT system.
A scary mistake
These notifications, which were not intended for public viewing, warned of various severe weather conditions such as abnormally high temperatures, snow, ice and rain in different areas on Thursday.
The alerts, generated by a third-party weather aggregator, were intended for an internal exercise. THE Met Officeresponsible for issuing official weather warnings, clarified that these were indeed test warnings and that they had been stopped very quickly.
Many people shared their surprise on social platforms likewith posts like “Why Did I Randomly Receive a Severe Weather Alert?” What is happening? » and others pointing out the obvious error, in particular with a high temperature alert in the middle of winter, with in this case 4°C outside.
According to the BBCTHE Met Office apologized for the incident and assured that steps were being taken with partners to rectify the situation. This is not the first time such errors have occurred. In October, the channel’s weather service experienced a similar issue where it displayed absurdly high wind speeds and temperatures due to a data error from a third-party provider.
This incident has caused a lot of publicity as it comes on the heels of real-life severe weather events, with Storm Bert recently causing widespread disruption including flooding and snow in Britain.
NB : On Apple devices, users must manually enable these critical alert notifications through their weather app settings.
