WASHINGTON (AP) — A private forecasting company is blaming the National Weather Service for a false tsunami alert sent to users’ mobile phones Tuesday morning.
AccuWeather says the weather service “miscoded” a test message as a real warning. Users of the popular AccuWeather app then got a false tsunami alert. The message was sent to users throughout the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.
The State College, Pennsylvania-based company says the weather service has a responsibility to “properly and consistently code the messages, for only they know if the message is correct or not.”
The weather service has said it’s looking into why the test message was transmitted as a real alert. Weather service officials didn’t immediately respond to AccuWeather’s assertions.
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