Emergency alert test returning in 2025 with nearly all UK mobiles affected
The message will come as part of a national test of the UK Emergency Alerts system by the government and mobile network operators.
Emergency alerts is a UK government service that warns people when there's a danger to life nearby.
Gov.uk says: "In an emergency, your mobile phone or tablet will receive an alert with advice about how to stay safe."
Alerts will only be sent by emergency services, government departments, agencies and public bodies.
They will usually alert people to things like sever flooding, fires or extreme weather.
Some people received emergency alerts from the UK and Scottish Governments back in January due to the red weather warning and strong winds associated with Storm Éowyn.
While the last test of the service took place on April 23, 2023.
An emergency alert was sent out to people across the UK and Northern Ireland in January due to Strom Eowyn. (Image: Rebecca Black/PA Wire)
The last test alert read: "Severe Alert. This is a test of Emergency Alerts, a new UK government service that will warn you if there's a life-threatening emergency nearby.
'In a real emergency, follow the instructions in the alert to keep yourself and others safe.
"Visit gov.uk/alerts for more information. This is a test. You do not need to take any action.'
Following the successful test of the UK Emergency Alerts system in 2023, the government said it would carry out "occasional operator tests" to assess improvements made.
The next national test is set to take place later this year (an exact date is yet to be revealed).
Every mobile phone in the UK is set to receive a new emergency alert test message in 2025. (Image: Lauren Hurley/PA Wire) The Gov.uk website says: "You may get this alert if you have a phone that has operator test alerts turned on.
"These operator tests are not alerting you of real danger. These alerts will always have 'operator' in the title and will confirm that no action is needed."
If you get an emergency alert, your mobile phone or tablet will:
Make a loud siren-like sound for 10 seconds
Vibrate
Read out the alert
The alert will also include a phone number or a link to the Gov.UK website for more information.
What does the alert look and sound like? 🚨 Emergency Alerts will appear on the home screen of your device and you will hear a loud siren-like sound and feel a vibration for up to 10 seconds. Watch the video below 📽️👇 pic.twitter.com/U0ZvNr31yt
— Cabinet Office (@cabinetofficeuk) March 19, 2023
Emergency alerts, according to the Government website, will only work on the following devices:
iPhones running iOS 14.5 or later
Android phones and tablets running Android 11 or later
Other phones that do not run iOS or Android may also receive alerts.
You may also still be able to receive alerts if operating on an earlier version of Android.
To check, search your device settings for 'emergency alerts'.
You will not receive an emergency alert message if your device is:
Turned off
Connected to a 2G or 3G network
Wifi only
Not compatible
In airplane mode
If you do not wish to receive an emergency alert message as part of the national training, you can opt out.
To stop receiving operator test alerts on Android devices, search your phone's settings for 'emergency alerts' and turn off 'test alerts', 'exercise alerts', 'operator defined' and 'operator alerts'.
If you cannot see them in your settings, the government recommends:
Opening your phone's calling app
Using the keypad to enter *#*#2627#*#*
Search your settings for 'emergency alerts' and turn off 'test alerts', 'exercise alerts', 'operator defined' and 'operator alerts'
RECOMMENDED READING:
Met Office emergency alerts gives Brits 'heart attacks' as they expect 'WW3'
Virgin Media O2 to continue switch off next month leaving customers with no internet
BBC iPlayer to stop working on select TV boxes from next month - is yours one?
Depending on the manufacturer and software version of your phone, emergency alert settings may be called different names, according to Gov.uk.
The settings can usually be found in one of the following ways. The government website says to go to:
'Message', then 'message settings, then 'wireless emergency alerts', then 'alert'
'Settings', then 'sounds', then 'advanced', then 'emergency broadcasts'
'Settings', then 'general settings', then 'emergency alerts'
"Then turn off 'test alerts', 'exercise alerts', 'operator defined' and 'operator alerts'," it adds.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Verge
23 minutes ago
- The Verge
Inside the automated warehouse where robots are packing your groceries
It's the lack of noise you notice first. There's no clatter of equipment, rumble of engines, or chatter of coworkers. Only the low hum of electronics. For an industrial space, this is eerily quiet, but it makes sense in a building where robots might outnumber people. I'm at a warehouse — or customer fulfilment center (CFC) — operated by online grocery company Ocado in Luton, just outside London. You might not have heard of Ocado, but it may still have delivered your groceries. Its technology handles online orders for Kroger across 14 US states, Sobeys in Canada, and both Morrisons and its own delivery brand in the UK, with other clients across Europe and Asia. The grocery business has tight margins, and online orders even more so, with stores having to front the added costs of picking, packing, and shipping orders. Ocado, which launched in 2000, has always been a proponent of using automation to cut those costs. At the heart of it all is 'the Grid.' Sprawling across most of the warehouse's top floor, this crisscross of tracks allows a fleet of hundreds of blocky, bulky robots to whoosh around, carefully controlled by a central computer to avoid collisions, moving custom-built trays of bread, tins, ready meals, and more to wherever they need to be. It's almost entirely automated — so much so that as I stand looking out from a maintenance walkway, I can't see a single soul apart from the Ocado employees guiding me around that morning. Few humans are required to supervise the robots or work alongside them. Even tech support is handled remotely, by a team in Bulgaria. At one point, I see a robot's cheery green LEDs turn amber, indicating a problem. It quickly halts, and sits there, flashing orange, for 30 seconds or so, then pings green and trundles happily on again, no in-person help required. None of this is new. In fact, it's not even the first time The Verge has seen it — back in 2018, we visited another CFC in the UK, when the Grid was cutting-edge. Now it's old news; not set to be replaced, but in the midst of an upgrade that adds one crucial element: arms. Let's step back for a moment. The cuboid bots on the Grid don't pack anyone's shopping bags. Until recently, they've only been tasked with moving crates, grabbing a box of beans from the chute where it's stored, and moving it to another chute, where it drops down alongside a human worker just in time for them to pack a couple of tins into someone's shopping bag. Workers are expected to pack items in seconds, and the system works because it's extraordinarily efficient. By the time an employee is ready to pack an item, it's already at their side, and a display is telling them how many to pack, into which bags, in which crates. Even the order of their instructions is calibrated by the computer to minimize unnecessary movement that might slow them down. This is human work, but optimized to its limits. But now there's something new. Perched across the Grid, rearing high above their squat compatriots, are a new type of robot. These sit in place, islands in the constant whir of movement around them. But just like the people standing a floor below, they're busy packing bags. Dubbed On-Grid Robotic Pick (OGRP), each arm is fitted with a small suction cup on one end. Sixty-five of them sit on the Grid in Luton, with 500 of the original robots that bring crates to them, some with customer shopping bags to be filled, others with groceries ready to be packed, and the arms pick objects up and pack them into the bags. Each OGRP arm has a camera to help pick up groceries, but they're not designed to recognize damaged goods, so they won't spot broken eggs or bruised apples, giving humans at least some advantage. In 2024, OGRP packed over 30 million orders with fewer than 100 arms installed, and by the end of this year Ocado expects to have almost 500 in place. James Matthews, Ocado's deputy CEO, tells me that right now the arms are able to pack around 40 percent of Ocado's groceries. The company expects to reach the 80 percent range, partly through the introduction of a range of new endpoint attachments to go along with the current suction cup, from a parallel gripper to a soft, handlike one. That's not a decade away, either — that's where they expect to be 'in the next two or three years.' Hitting 100 percent isn't part of the plan. Ocado expects that some items just won't be worth automating. Wine bottles and watermelons are too heavy for the current suction cup to handle, and a gripper might cause damage. Ocado is developing a dedicated attachment for wine bottles, because it processes a lot of them, but it's leaving watermelons to the humans — developing a dedicated tool just for one item simply isn't worth it. But things can change. When The Verge visited Ocado all those years ago, we saw an early prototype of OGRP, long before it was ready to roll out. 'Nothing stumps a robot quite like a bag of oranges,' we wrote at the time, highlighting the limits of the tech: the bags move unpredictably, there's no easy point for a suction cup to grab, and too strong a grip leaves you with juice, not fruit. Ocado agreed that this was beyond their reach, but eight years on, Matthews tells me, the robots have figured it out for themselves. The AI models that underpin their programming (which Matthews calls 'cousins' of the generative AI models grabbing headlines elsewhere) weren't trained for bags of fruit, but after experimentation learned they could attach their suction cup to the right point on the label and lift the whole bag from there, unlocking a new skill for every robot across the range. Ocado is looking at opportunities for automation almost everywhere in the warehouse. There are still workers unpacking incoming shipments of products and loading them into the crates on the Grid, but I'm quickly told the company is working on new automations for that. Others load heavy metal trollies onto the outgoing vans, but there's a mobile robot in development for that job too. The safest of the lot might be the actual drivers — while Ocado invests in both Wayve and Oxa, two UK startups working on autonomous driving, Matthews doesn't see deliveries becoming fully automated anytime soon. This is, after all, the one point in the process that's customer-facing, and Matthews doesn't sound too tempted by a future where customers are tasked with unloading delivery vans for themselves. Delivery aside, Ocado is well suited to automation because its pursuit of efficiency has already made so many of its jobs simple, mechanical, and repetitive anyway. The more efficient and focused workers are, the easier it is to design a robot to take over for them. Plus, some of the jobs it's replacing are grueling and difficult to staff at the best of times, like employees tasked with packing ice cream and other frozen food. 'You just literally cannot find the people who want to come in and work in a freezer,' Matthews claims, making these jobs natural candidates to automate. But Ocado also enjoys a certain amount of distance from the staff it replaces. It sells the technology inside its CFCs to clients, but doesn't run day-to-day operations itself. Visit a Kroger CFC in the US, and it might be packed to the rafters with Ocado robots, but the human employees will all be paid by Kroger, not Ocado — and when layoffs come around, it's not Ocado administering them. Ocado itself isn't cutting jobs. In fact, it's growing, Matthews tells me, opening more sites, expanding its R&D, and hiring more remote support workers. Additional automation, and fewer human jobs, is clearly in the future for the grocery stores Ocado supports, though. But what exactly will that future look like? Eight years ago, the robotic arms were the promise of tomorrow, so what's their equivalent now? 'Efficiency' might be one answer. Ocado is working on lighter, cheaper, and more energy-efficient versions of its robots, including new 3D-printed Cartesian models that weigh a third of the originals. That has knock-on effects — lighter robots are less likely to cause damage or harm someone in a collision, so Ocado can reduce the size of the crash barriers around the Grid, making it more compact and more modular, easier to scale down to smaller sites. But if you ask Matthews, the bigger changes will be harder to predict. The arms only made the jump from development project to working infrastructure when the AI models inside them made their own leap forward. The most important problems aren't the physical ones, but the analytical ones, designing machines intelligent enough to work through the edge cases, to adapt to problems like a bent crate that won't fit its rack, causing a jam. 'It isn't useful solving something 90 percent of the time,' Matthews says. 'Because if 10 percent of the time you have to pay an expensive engineer to go and unjam it, you're better off doing it manually.' Those 10 percent problems are where Ocado and its clients still feel the need to keep people involved — but it's not much of a gap for the machines to close. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Dominic Preston Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Robot Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Tech
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Why Mohamed El-Erian is 'incredibly optimistic' about AI
Queens College Cambridge president Mohamed El-Erian joins Morning Brief with Julie Hyman to discuss the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and why he feels optimistic about the technology's potential in productivity. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Doctors trained to use robotic surgery machine
A group of doctors have begun training which will allow them to use robotic equipment to carry out surgery. They have been learning how to use the multi-million pound Da Vinci robotic surgery machine at the University Hospital of North Tees robotic surgery suite in Stockton. It will allow them to carry out less invasive procedures with quicker recovery times. The hospital's robotic surgery matron, Sarah Waite, said the training suite and theatre was a "huge benefit for patients" and helped attract new doctors to work at the site. "Robotic-assisted surgery is the future. It's much more precise, more efficient and less intrusive for patients," she said. "The doctors we are training will spend a year with us, learning all the intricacies of robotic-assisted surgery. "It's not an easy task but I'm sure they will all rise to the occasion." The robotic suite carries out about two to four surgeries a day for gynaecology, colorectal and urology procedures. Dr Sarah Safdar, who was being trained in obstetrics and gynaecology, said the classes had allowed her to see the robotic surgery process for the first time. "It's a new innovation in gynaecology and I'm really excited to learn more," she said. Follow BBC Tees on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram. More stories Can robots like Roxy revolutionise cancer surgery? The robot revolutionising gynaecological surgery Related internet links University Hospital of North Tees
