The WORST Text Message Ever Sent: What Caused Hawaii's Nuclear False Alarm?

Youtube not the same without the dislike button. Already feeling the effects trying to find adobe tutorials. Impossible to find good guides now

I'm from Hawaii, and back in 2018, I woke up to this, thought "Oh shit" moved under my bed, and fell back asleep. My thought process was "I don't know where it'll hit, and if my house collapses, my bed could be able to protect me a little bit. If I die, I'm gonna die doing what I love, sleeping."

One dude was out golfing when this warning happened. He recorded a video where he basically said he'd keep golfing and see what happens. Man was fully ready to go out doing what he loved.

I work in emergency management and this incident is famous. Employee 1 is a cause of debate. Employee 1 sent the message in error, but the processes and protocols to protect them from this sort of thing weren’t working. BUT Employee 1 acted swiftly and decisively in an emergency situation, exactly as you should. “In an emergency is better to make a decision which will keep people safe in error than to be indecisive and people die”

On a lighthearted note, the one guy on Reddit talked about his dad's reaction to the message: he hid in his closet, eating a whole loaf of bread. He reasoned it would have been a waste of perfectly good bread not to eat it

I guess it is better to misinterpret a test warning as a missile threat than the other way around.

I was 18 when it happened, and severely depressed. I was going to U of Hawaii, and when I got the message on my phone I figured it was time to go. I went outside and sat on a bench and waited, while everybody was running past me going to campus buildings, panicking. Needless to say, I'm still here. It was a wake up call though.

Punishing Employee 1 was the worst thing they could do. The other employees will now be hesitant to act in a similar situation and hesitation could mean the loss of thousands of lives.

I remember waking up and getting that text message. I told my dad, he said it was probably a false alarm, so we both shrugged and went back to sleep. The funniest thing I remember was a guy who streamed on Youtube quoting Bible verses and was ready for the rapture, only for people to tell him in the chat it was a false alarm.

Honestly I forgive Employee 1. It sounds like he genuinely believed that Hawaii was getting nuked and he chose to inform the public instead of letting everyone die.

This is making me feel better about the fact that I accidentally sent an event invitation with the wrong time at work today.

He gave false alarm, gets fired. If he didn’t sent the alarm in a real case scenario, a catastrophe would have happened. It is better to be safe than sorry. I understand how those civilians were affected and the anxiety they faced but I prefer this to happen rather than getting vaporized without a warning.

My aunt and uncle just moved to Hawaii. My cousin died of an overdose and they are completely broken. When they got the message they just went outside and opened some bourbon and told my cousin they would see him soon. Ugh I don’t know why this always messes with me so bad but it’s one of those things that makes my chest hurt thinking about. I just had to vent somewhere

This is a famous test case now. A lot of people in emergency security management actually feel like Employee-1 is an exemplary example of what to do in a real fire case; since protocols designed to excise potential false-fire events just literally were not happening.

I was living in Hawaii at the time when this happened and let me tell you, for me and my family, as well as many of the other families we knew, this was an absolute terrifying 45 minutes. To this day my wife still gets extreme anxiety attacks whenever she hears the emergency alarm go off on her phone. I don’t think many people understand what it felt like to know there was a good chance you were literally about to die…

If Employee 1 was already underperforming I guess I understand why he was terminated, but I find it hard to actually blame him for this. With all the issues that came out after the report it feels like he was just honestly doing what he thought was right when the entire place was horribly mismanaged. Also the idea of including the message "This is not a drill" in a drill is next level stupid and imo the night shift supervisor is more responsible for this incident than Employee 1.

As someone who deals with shift changes within a government capacity I can understand the chaos, often times things that should have been handled the shift prior they will leave for you to deal with. But literally having a nuclear ballistic missile threat during shift change... I applaud employee #1 because if a nuke had launched that day he would have saved thousands of lives, it's only because they had horrible standards and he was the scape goat that he was not the hero, which he proved to be by pushing the button when evidence told him too.

Im from north of Sweden, we were in Honolulu at the time when this happened. It was so surreal, that sound all our phones were making, i never knew it coumd do that! My gf ran to the neighbor and asked what to do? They told us to stay inside so we all sat down in the kitchen, looking at eachother, wondering what to do. After 20min i said fuck this and made a toast lol, im not gonna die hungry! The most surreal thing ive experienced ever! I will always remember this

Seeing that kid being placed in the manhole made me really think about how many poor children will forever face trauma in one way or another due to this. I remember how scared I was as a kid having to go down to the basement for a tornado warning in my area, and it still makes me a bit uneasy all these years later. I can’t imagine how they feel…

When the system is that bad I really wouldn't blame that guy too hard