Katwarn Fails Again in a Real Emergency

This translation was generated automatically.

During the attack at the Olympia shopping centre, I wrote about how poorly Katwarn performed its basic function.

There was another real emergency today: a knife attacker downtown. At 9:47 a.m., police warned the public on Twitter:

Police operation at Rosenheimer Platz. Attacker injured several people with a knife. More information to follow. #Munich — Munich Police, October 21, 2017

A minute later, at 9:48, they told people to stay indoors:

Warning: Avoid #RosenheimerPlatz. The suspect is still at large. Residents should stay indoors. #Munich — Munich Police, October 21, 2017

Katwarn’s SMS warning arrived 17 minutes later.

City of Munich reports: warning, special situation. Valid from 21 October 2017, 10:05. More information via social media and radio. (in 81241)

No information at all. Which social media? Figure it out yourself. Maybe aliens have landed; maybe the beer at Hofbräuhaus is out. Facebook or Twitter or what?

A minute later, the warning arrived in the app:

Avoid Rosenheimer Platz, #Munich #KATWARN #RosenheimerPlatz photo — Kerstin Kitzmann, October 21, 2017

Only now did it contain the actual alert, with a link to the fire department’s Facebook page.

The background: according to the fire department, it can’t post information on muenchen.de quickly enough, so it uses Facebook instead. In my opinion, that’s unacceptable.

There was also an email warning. Another minute later.

The subject line said “Test alert”. But this was a real emergency. Edit: wrong screenshot; this is the correct one now.

The link to the fire department’s Facebook page isn’t clickable here. A silly beginner mistake URL-encoded the colons and slashes unnecessarily. The link leads nowhere, to http://2fwww.facebook.com instead of the fire department’s page.

Questions that have gone unanswered for more than a year:

• Why not use the mobile network, as many other countries do, to send one message simultaneously to all users? Another advantage: these alerts can make a silenced phone ring loudly again.
• Why can it take over 15 minutes between a tweet and a Katwarn warning? Why does the SMS contain no real information?
• Should public institutions use Facebook simply because they lack technical competence?