The warning came from ShakeAlert, the earthquake early-warning system run by the U.S. Geological Survey at the Department of the Interior. The system, which operates in California<\/a>, Oregon and Washington<\/a>, is designed to provide advanced notice about earthquakes so people can turn off machinery or get to safe locations before shaking begins.<\/p>\n Within minutes of the alert, officials realized there had been no earthquake, pulled the alert and confirmed on social media it had been a false alarm.<\/p>\n \u201cThe earthquake alerts that were delivered at 8:06am are cancelled,\u201d USGS posted on Facebook and other major social platforms shortly after the false warnings were sent. \u201cThere was no M5.9 earthquake near Carson City, NV. We are currently looking into why the alerts were issued.\u201d<\/p>\n Robert de Groot, who heads the Shake Alert operations team at USGS, said the automatic detection system detected ground motion and triggered the false alert, but confirmed within minutes that an earthquake had not occurred. He said Shake Alert uses four sensors, rather than one, to mitigate false alerts. In this instance, all four sensors went off.<\/p>\n \u201cThe important thing is the shaker Earthquake Early Warning System performed as it was designed in terms of the sensor network, which actually detects the earthquake and the ground motion, de Groot said. \u201cThe system was just reacting to the data that that looked and smelled like an earthquake. Something was detected at those sensors.\u201d<\/p>\n The USGS tracks false earthquake alerts on its website<\/a>, which states that the \u201cfaster we release earthquake locations and magnitudes, the more likely it is that the information may be erroneous.\u201d The department lists two false alerts since ShakeAlert\u2019s 2019 launch<\/a>, both issued in California in 2020. One alert detected seismic activity 200 kilometers away from the where the sensor was located and was unlikely to result in an earthquake. The other was triggered by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake in Russia<\/a>, which confused the earthquake monitoring system in Northern California.<\/p>\n De Groot said that while Shake Alert has issued more than 170 successful alerts, Thursday\u2019s miscommunication is unlike the others in that it\u2019s the first time the system has issued a false alert using data that was not collected from an actual earthquake that took place. The team is still investigating the source of the trigger.<\/p>\n \u201cEarthquake early warning is done over a very short time period, we\u2019re talking matters of seconds,\u201d de Groot said. \u201cSo if you put your hand on your heart couple of heartbeats, that time of two heartbeats or so, about a second, that is all we need to get things moving in the Shake Alert system.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t \n\t\t\tWritten by Sophia Fox-Sowell![\"Sophia](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/sophiafox.jpg\")
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\n\t\t\tSophia Fox-Sowell reports on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and government regulation for StateScoop. She was previously a multimedia producer for CNET, where her coverage focused on private sector innovation in food production, climate change and space through podcasts and video content. She earned her bachelor\u2019s in anthropology at Wagner College and master\u2019s in media innovation from Northeastern University.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday morning, many people across Northern California and Nevada saw earthquake alerts, warning of a magnitude 5.9…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83419,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,47323,3934,47324,3482,47325,7105,47326,8953],"class_list":["post-83418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-earthquake-detection","tag-earthquakes","tag-government-technology","tag-nevada","tag-sensors","tag-shake-alert","tag-state-news","tag-usgs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}