Today, at 2:20 PM Eastern Time or shortly thereafter, cell phones throughout the United States are going to buzz, beep, and shake. And there isn't much you can do about it. It's part of a test of the American government's Wireless Emergency Alerts, a system designed to let people across the nation know if something really bad or dangerous is happening. As CNN reports, "Essentially, what this means is that you can expect hundreds of millions of cell phones around the country to make a screeching alert noise at approximately the same time today, beginning around 2:20 pm ET" and your phone is likely to be one of those hundreds of millions: "while some recent models of mobile phones may include a setting to opt-out of tests and alerts, none of these settings will affect the 2023 national test." You can turn your phone off put it on airplane mode if you really don't want to be bothered, but don't worry about it otherwise -- as the message will say, this is only a test.

Unless someone screws up, that is. And if so, it wouldn't be the first time. Or, for that matter, the second.

The most recent one you may remember. On January 18, 2018, Hawaiians received a push notification, as seen here, alerting islanders to an incoming ballistic missile attack, instructing them to seek shelter, and warning that "this is not a drill." It was, in fact, a drill -- and one that should have never involved regular people and their phones. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency was running a test of their systems, and per some reports, an employee got confused, thinking that the training exercise was an actual emergency. Regardless of what the employee believed, what happened next was clear: chaos. As the Washington Post reported, "From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: 'Test missile alert' and 'Missile alert.' He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert." It took nearly 40 minutes for the agency to retract the erroneous message, and as you can imagine, a lot of people were very, very scared. (Here's a second Washington Post article sharing some reactions.)  As seen below, the Hawaiian government did everything it could to communicate that this was a false alarm. Two agency executives resigned as a result of the scare, and the employee who screwed up was fired after an investigation.