January 13, the horror of human error has proven itself to be deadly enough to send a whole state into panic. January 16, it happened again.

While the rest of the U.S. was living their lives as normal, blissfully unaware of the chaos across the country, Hawaii’s public broadcaster sent out a warning of an imminent ballistic missile threat. As residents began to fall into panic, desperately making their “last” calls and searching for shelter, they were unaware that the alert was only a mistake. In fact, no one knew it was a false alarm until 38 minutes into the scare.

Many people have been wondering how a mistake like this could happen, but through investigations it’s become aware that the government alert system itself is quite confusing.

As you can see it looks pretty easy to click the wrong thing here. Still many have argued 38 minutes seems like an awful long time to let people know it was just a mistake-especially since it’s been reported that they did not need any form of approval to retract the alert. Since the occurrence, officials have slightly updated the interface.

Only days after the “misunderstanding” in Hawaii, Japan faces its own missile scare. This time however, it only lasted a few minutes before it was quickly corrected by officials.

I asked junior, Helen Tran, what her thoughts on the incident in Hawaii were “I heard from a friend and I thought that it seemed fake so I went to look it up and I was really surprised that it happened” she recalls. I then asked what she thought about it happening again in Japan; she said “well I have family there so I can’t imagine how they felt during that”.