The people of Japan received a jarring emergency alert at 12:40 p.m. local time Friday (overnight Thursday-Friday in the U.S.) warning of a 9.9-magnitude earthquake, a measurement never recorded in history. Journalists made the same warning on TV, and city loudspeakers announced their own alerts across the country.
But it was all a false alarm. There was a 6.9 earthquake that hit near Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, northeast of Japan, and hundreds of miles away. But nothing hit the island nation of 122 million people. The Japan Meteorological Agency withdrew the notice eight minutes later. It was the first emergency earthquake warning ever to be withdrawn, the Japan Times reports.
What went wrong? The Japan Meteorological Agency is reportedly investigating, though there’s speculation that it may have been “applying a magnitude formula designed for domestic earthquakes to one occurring far from Japan.” There have been no reports of damage from the quake in Russia, though at least one train line was reportedly disrupted in Japan as it was automatically shut down temporarily in anticipation of a large earthquake.
It’s not the first false alarm in the Japanese agency’s history. But the size of the warning is what has understandably jolted people to attention. The strongest earthquake ever recorded was a 9.5 in Biobío, Chile, in 1960. That quake killed 1,655 people and left about 2 million people homeless, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
9 earthquake may have been the result of a cyberattack, a reasonable assumption in 2026 given all of the ways that hackers are increasingly messing with us.
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