USGS software glitch leads to 6.8M earthquake alerts for Santa Barbara

Did you feel it? You probably got the alerts or maybe friends and family frantically called your phone. Santa Barbara was rocked by a magnitude 6.8 earthquake late Wednesday afternoon. Except–no earthquake ever occurred.

The U.S. Geological Survey sent out the earthquake notice alerting the public that a major earthquake had struck about 10 miles southwest of downtown Santa Barbara. They quickly took to Twitter to announce it was sent in error.

But how could something like this happen?

Dr. Lucy Jones, a seismologist and USGS Scientist Emerita, said that a software glitch is to blame.

“A software glitch turned an update of the magnitude of 1925 Santa Barbara quake M6.8 into a 2025 quake,” tweeted Jones.

A software glitch turned an update of the magnitude of 1925 Santa Barbara quake M6.8 into a 2025 quake. New method for predicting quakes?

— Dr. Lucy Jones (@DrLucyJones) June 22, 2017

The USGS corroborated the claim at about 5:30 p.m. on Twitter.

“An errant earthquake notification was distributed at 4:49 p.m. PDT over the Earthquake Notification System. It was caused by a revision of the historic 1925 M6.8 Santa Barbara earthquake and was misinterpreted by software as a current event. We are working to resolve this issue,” stated USGS.

Regarding: https://t.co/z8Ykmo6OXX pic.twitter.com/68Q0I2Ix2j

— USGS (@USGS) June 22, 2017

For the latest earthquakes and information, visit https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes.