If you have loved ones near the Santa Barbara area, we sure hope you weren’t on Twitter yesterday.
At around 5:00 P.M., researchers at the California Institute of Technology accidentally triggered an alert about a 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Isla Vista by the USGS that was subsequently retweeted by news outlets around the world. There’s just one problem: that earthquake happened in 1925.
The false alarm was triggered while researchers were trying to pinpoint the exact location of the 1925 quake for historical database purposes. It looks like the system mistook it for a current tremor and sent out an automatic alert, which it’s programmed to do in the event of an actual quake.
The L.A. Times, which also has an automatic quake alert system in place, tweeted it out immediately as well. They soon took the tweet down with this brief explanation.
Please note: We just deleted an automated tweet saying there was a 6.8 earthquake in Isla Vista. That earthquake happened in 1925.
— L.A. Times: L.A. Now (@LANow) June 22, 2017
As you can imagine, the snafu resulted in a flurry of hilarious follow-up tweets like this one from the NBA.
Back in 1925 we were all on 56k dialup, and tweets were slow to process.
— InsideHoops.com NBA (@InsideHoops) June 22, 2017
We’re just glad everyone’s safe.