It’s been talked about for weeks and weeks at this point and today is finally the day that we have our national alert tested ahead of it rolling out for actual use in October.
The national alert test is happening on Monday July 27th at the below times:
A single test will be sent to every single phone at the same time with devices vibrating and playing a siren-like warning sound for about 10 seconds. The alert will also appear on screen and it will say very clearly that it is a test with no reason to panic and no action required.
Obviously there will be variation on how this appears depending on what OS you’re using, but we’d expect it to be a white box with black text that is very obviously different to every other notification that you’d get on your phone.
On some older devices, it may come through as a presidential alert or an extreme threat alert, both which sound a little more alarming, but it should still be very clear that it is a test.
Obviously everyone will receive the alert at the same time, but if whatever reason you can’t or don’t want to, you can turn your phone off or switch to aeroplane mode. There is no way to turn the actual alert system off or stop your phone receiving them if it is turned on.