The false alert went out on Jan. 9 to the cell phones of 10 million residents across Los Angeles County. In complex systems, failure is a particular combination of needs, people and problems that ...

An emergency alert message on an iPhone is pictured in Carleton Place, Ont., on Sunday, Jan. 12, 2020. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick / The Canadian Press ...

The false alert was “not being activated or initiated by a person,” he said at the time, blaming an unknown technical glitch that officials had not yet been able to identify and fix.

By mistake, the evacuation alert went out to cellphones across all of Los Angeles County. To make matters worse, repeated false alerts were reported to have been sent out 11 times .