USGS ShakeAlert System Reportedly Generated False Earthquake Alert Affecting Nevada and California

December 4, 2025

On December 4, 2025, the US Geological Survey's (USGS) ShakeAlert earthquake detection system issued a false warning of a magnitude 5.9 quake near Dayton, NV. This false alert led to emergency alerts on cell phones in CA, advising residents to take protective measures. However, no earthquake actually occurred. USGS is now examining if sensor noise or other irregularities precipitated the system malfunction.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.641, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.2 — similarity 0.604, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.7 — similarity 0.601, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: united-states-geological-survey-(usgs)
Alleged developer: united-states-geological-survey-(usgs), berkeley-seismological-laboratory
Alleged harmed parties: general-public, general-public-of-nevada, general-public-of-california, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1303

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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