Phones buzzed in the San Francisco Bay Area shortly after 8 a.m. on Thursday with an urgent call to drop, cover and hold for a 5.9-magnitude earthquake in Nevada, just east of Lake Tahoe — an earthquake that never happened.
The quake report was a false alarm and was quickly deleted from the U.S. Geological Survey’s list of earthquakes. But that didn’t stop widespread speculation on social media about what else could have caused an alert from the Nevada desert.
“This was a false alert by the #ShakeAlert system and this is currently being investigated,” the MyShake app, which draws from the USGS-managed ShakeAlert system, wrote on social media. “This system has delivered more than 170 real alerts since 2019 and this incident is both unprecedented and rare.”…