Image copyright Twitter Image caption The message Hawaiians saw on their phones

An incoming missile alert plunged residents of Hawaii into panic on Saturday morning before it was declared a false alarm. After the US military confirmed no missile threat had been detected, and the alert had been released in error, Governor Ige explained:

"It was a procedure that occurs at the change of shift which they go through to make sure that the system is working, and an employee pushed the wrong button." The incident prompted defense agencies including the Pentagon and the U.S. Pacific Command to issue the same statement, that they had “detected no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii.”

Michael Kucharek, spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command are still trying to verify what happened in Hawaii — but that “NORAD did not see anything that indicated any sort of threat to Hawaii.”

NORAD is a U.S.-Canada joint command that conducts aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning to defend North America. The emergency alert, which was sent to cellphones statewide just before 8.10 am, warned people about an inbound missile and asked them to seek immediate shelter. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” the bogus alert sent at 8.07 am to cellphones statewide read. It caused panic across the US island chain following months of soaring tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over North Korea's nuclear weapon and ballistic missile program. The erroneous alert sent recipients into a state of frenzy, with scores reportedly running for shelter and taking cover, until Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard debunked the alert as a false alarm. Governor Ige said human error during one of the thrice-daily shift changes at the state's Emergency Management Agency (EMA) was to blame for the false alert. White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said it “was purely a state exercise.”

The alert caused a tizzy on the island and across social media.
An emergency alert warning of an inbound ballistic missile is accidentally sent out across the U.S. state of Hawaii at 8:07 HST, before being cleared as a false alarm 38 minutes later. This event caused panic and disruptions across the state on the archipelago inhabited by roughly 1.7 million people.