A woman says she has had to switch off the emergency alert system on her phone after the Government's text message kept coming through every time she turned her phone on.
Kate Higgins had the siren and message on her phone the same as most other people at around 3pm on Sunday. But she says the message then kept coming through every time she turned her phone on.
Kate told BristolLive: "Soon after (the first message) my phone ran out of charge, I put it on charge and then when it turned back on, the alarm went off again even though it had the first time, and I cleared it.
"So I cleared it and turned my phone on and off four more times, and I kept getting a new emergency alert each time my phone came back on, even though I closed and cleared the alert."
She says family members had the same fault, adding: "Every time a phone was turned off and on again, a new test emergency alert sounded. Between the three of us, we had 12 alerts. We’ve had to turn off the alert settings so that each time our phone turns off and on again, we don’t get an alert, which could be dangerous."
The Government sent out the message as a test of the new emergency alert system that will be used to warn people of threats such as flooding.
Liam Moran said received the text and siren alert as expected but was woken in the early hours of Monday morning when his phone began making the 10-second warning sound again.
He said: "I got the alarm at 3 pm like everybody else did, and I thought ok, that's normal. Then I got woke up at 3.49 am with the same noise, so I knew it was the alarm again.
"It kind of freaked me out a bit because I thought, as far as I knew, it was only going to be 3 pm. So I'm thinking we're bloody getting invaded or something.
One BristolLive reader said: "I got four alerts yesterday, the first at 14:59 and the last at 16:45 my partner got his at 15:10. It felt a bit chaotic all around."
Hannah Godfrey said: "I got an alert at 12.13am this morning! It was my third alert. I’ve now turned them off." Susan King replied: "You must have had one of mine! We got no alerts at all!"
Tom Murphy also had an early morning wake-up call. He said: "Had the second one at 05.25 this morning", while Jane Ogborne noted she also had a follow-up alert at 10am.
A government spokesperson said: "We have effectively completed the test of the UK-wide Emergency Alerts system, the biggest public communications exercise of its kind ever done. We are working with mobile network operators to review the outcome and any lessons learned."
