Just three days after an employee mistakenly triggered a missile alert in Hawaii, Japan is facing its own false alarm.
NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting organization, mistakenly sent out an alert on Tuesday suggesting that North Korea had fired a missile heading toward Japan.
#BREAKING: Japan's national broadcaster NHK just sent a text alert reporting that North Korea launched another missile … and then corrected itself pic.twitter.com/5Cyreba8rg
— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) January 16, 2018
The alert, which was sent to mobile phone users with the NHK app installed, read: “NHK news alert. North Korea likely to have launched missile. The government J alert: evacuate inside the building or underground.”
Read: Hawaii Missile Alert Was Caused by Human Error, Officials Say
The broadcaster did ensure that it did not follow in the footsteps of the Hawaii incident, however, in which it took nearly 38 minutes to correct the erroneous alert, sending people into panic. NHK quickly corrected itself and sent another alert within about five minutes saying that it was a false alarm and apologizing for the error.
The cause of the false alarm was not made immediately clear.