But it sounds like they have some bugs to work out.

.. hundreds of miles away. Scared the shit out of me at 12:30am.

I don't understand what exactly they want people to do when they get this alert.
How big an area are they talking about?

"Hey, I have a great idea! So let's implement it and THEN figure out what bugs it might have.
Millions of cell phone customers can be our guinea pigs, think of how much money we will save in testing!"

Jeez, the effort it took to have the cell phone companies make this operational could have been spent thinking it thru first. What the hell good does it do to wake up and annoy a million people on the chance that ONE of them will be
concerned about a missing kid in an undisclosed area?

I don't know what they want people to do about it no matter what time of day it is.

the entire country is being jerked out of a sound sleep.

edited to add: yet another reason I do not have a cell phone.

it's a Tracfone. I doubt that they will be bothering my low rent behind.

"Remember - consumption is patriotic!"

"Freedom is slavery!"

Happened with recent storms - phone made a sound I never heard - what the hell is that?!
Thought maybe my belt wasn't buckled, car alarm...took a sec to figure out!

Normally I never listen to radio, and have no tv..the silence in the house is so marvelous.
But, a few weeks ago, we knew there was a bad storm coming in, so I turned on the local radio station for the
tornado warnings.
The station uses a direct feed from the weather service.
The feed consists of 4 blaring beeping LOUD sounds, then the report of possible tornado info.
Repeated every 5 minutes or so.
After about an hour of the LOUD blaring preamble, I had to turn the radio off. Too damn nerve wracking.
Went back to using the computer to track the tornadoes.
Can only imagine the heart pounding reaction to somethng like that going off on your cell phone in the dead of night.

Mainly flash flooding, but others, severe T-storm I don't get. I haven't been in a tornado watch area yet so I don't know if I get those or not.

The tone is the same as the EAS tone on the cable system.

Mine was a fucking flash flood warning at 1:00 a.m. Didn't tell me where, just to "check local media".

I don't live on a riverbank and I don't need a damn flash flood warning at 1:00 a.m.

First thing I did was try to figure out how to disable that horrible noise from ever happening on my phone again.

There are four levels of alerts:

1. "Presidential-level alert (Mandatory alert)." You can NOT disable this one.

2. "Extreme alert (Extreme threat to life and property)."

3. "Severe alert (Severe threat to life and property)."

4. "AMBER alert (Child abduction emergency)."

The alert didn't just disappear. I had no idea that amber alerts would set off iPhones until it happened to me & a friend at the same time. All we saw was something like a text, which then disappeared. But we couldn't find it again to read it more closely.