PhotoA tsunami alert buzzed phones across multiple states on Tuesday morning, but it was missing a critical piece of information: This was a test. The message, issued by the National Weather Service as part of a monthly exercise, was passed along as a real warning by AccuWeather, a private weather company headquartered in State College, Pa.AccuWeather blamed the weather service for the erroneous alert, accusing it of sending out a “miscoded” warning, but the government disputed that account on Tuesday night. “Our investigation into this routine monthly tsunami test message confirmed that it was coded as a test message,” the National Weather Service said in a statement. “We are working with private-sector companies to determine why some systems did not recognize the coding.”Advertisement Continue reading the main storyThe weather service said that there were “widespread reports” of tsunami warnings across the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Source: New York Times February 06, 2018 16:19 UTC