US EditionGoogle Revises Android Earthquake Alerts After Major Miss in Turkey
TURKEY, JUL 28 – Google's system sent only 469 critical alerts instead of 10 million during Turkey's 7.8 magnitude quake due to algorithm limitations, affecting millions at risk, the company admitted.
- On February 6, 2023, a powerful earthquake measuring 7.8 on the magnitude scale hit the Gaziantep area in southeastern Turkey, resulting in the deaths of more than 55,000 people and injuring upwards of 100,000.
- Google's Android Earthquake Alerts system underestimated the quake’s strength, initially estimating a magnitude between 4.5 and 4.9, which prevented timely TakeAction alerts before the first tremor at 4:17 am local time.
- Following a second major quake later that day, the system sent 8,158 high-level TakeAction warnings and nearly four million lower-level BeAware alerts designed for light shaking to users across the region.
- Google acknowledged the system's partial failure, citing 'limitations to the detection algorithms,' and said it continues improving after publishing research in the Science journal detailing these issues.
- This event highlights challenges in tuning early warning algorithms for large earthquakes and suggests reliance on such systems requires transparency and integration with national alerts to improve effectiveness.
52 Articles
52 Articles
If it had worked well, Google's Earthquake Alert System could have saved thousands of lives in Turkey's 2023 earthquake.
Google officially confirmed the failure of the Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) early warning system, which was unable to send emergency warnings to millions of people during the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey, as reported by BBC News with reference to the company's statement.
Google’s Android early warning system severely underestimated Turkey’s lethal earthquakes.
Android Earthquake Alerts uses the network of smartphones to detect tremors, sending alerts to other phones in the affected area. But in a paper published in Science, the company admitted it had found “several limitations” in the algorithm’s performance during two 2023 quakes that killed over 55,000 people. It underestimated the 7.8 and 7.7 magnitude quakes, and instead of sending 10 million “TakeAction” alerts, which override Do Not Disturb, it…
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