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If you are in California, Oregon or Washington, you can receive earthquake early warning alerts. Early warning alerts are for an earthquake happening right now and are meant for you to take protective action.

To set up, all you need to do is add your Homebase, ie the address where you live. If the app didn't already prompt you to enter a Homebase, you may enter it yourself by going into the settings page of the app. That is all you need to do.

You cannot add multiple Homebases, but you may choose to turn on Location permissions so you can get alerted for example at your workplace too.

Remember to open the app once every couple of weeks to keep the app fresh and ready to receive alerts.

The early warning alerts are sent for all earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or more in areas of light shaking or greater. These thresholds are set by government agencies and cannot be altered. The system is designed to rapidly detect an earthquake, estimate its magnitude and shaking intensity, and to send alerts. It is possible that the intial magnitude estimate is incorrect. It is possible that the light shaking is imperceptible to you.

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We recommend you use the app at least once every month, just for a couple of minutes. This will keep the app fresh and ready to receive alerts. Not using the app for a prolonged period might cause the app to be put into deep sleep and potentially unable to receive alerts.

The easiest way to remember to use the app periodically is to tap on the earthquake notification you might get once every couple of weeks. The app is configured to notify you of M6.5 or above earthquakes occuring anywhere in the world. M6.5 earthquakes occur with a frequency of roughly once every two weeks. By tapping on this notification, and opening the MyShake app, you can keep the app fresh, and not have to rely on your own reminders to use the app!

If you are not getting any notifications, please check the screenshots on this FAQ answer to make sure you have the Global notifications enabled.

If you are unsure that your app can still receive alerts, email us your app debug information by following the screenshots in this FAQ answer. We will send you a private test alert.

We send alerts for earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 or more in areas of light shaking or greater. Check to see if the earthquake you experienced was large enough. You might have to wait several minutes before the MyShake app will show the quake (click the refresh button, ie the circle-arrow button, to refresh the map).

This alert threshold of M4.5 is set by scientists and government agencies. Smaller earthquakes are unlikely to create damaging shaking, hence we do not alert for smaller earthquakes.

If the earthquake was M4.5+, check to see if you got the alert. If not, check to see if your Homebase is set, or your location permissions is enabled.

If all that looks good, and you didn't receive an alert, we can debug it. Please go into the MyShake app -> Settings -> Debug Info and e-mail the debug information (see screenshots below). We will take a look.

The map displays earthquakes globally at magnitude 3.5 or higher by default. If you don't see the earthquake, check your map filters and adjust as needed.

If the earthquake is very recent, it may take several minutes for USGS to publish it and for it to appear on the map. Please refresh the map in a few minutes to see the earthquake.

MyShake is an earthquake app used throughout the world. Therefore, by default, we configured the system to notify you of M6.5 or larger earthquakes anywhere in the world.

NOTE: These are normal notifications of an earthquake that have already happened, they are not early warning alerts. Early warning alerts are the loud drop, cover, holdon alerts sent during M4.5 or larger earthquakes that might cause shaking at your Homebase.

The latest release of the app (ie, v3.1.28 or later) will also notify you of M3.0 or larger earthquakes within 50mi of your Homebase (ie the smaller local earthquakes). This is in response to feedback from our users who expect to be notified of local earthquakes at magnitudes smaller than M4.5.

You may visit the Settings->Custom Earthquake Notifications page to modifiy these normal notification settings.

NOTE: Early warning settings are automatic, there is no configuration to be made for early warning alerts, besides setting your Homebase.

You may also add up to three custom locations for which are you interested in receiving notifications.

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All messages that the MyShake app receives are logged. Please see screenshots below to review whether you received the message. Earthquake Early Warning alerts will always show with the big DROP, COVER, HOLD ON! image.

Sorry, you cannot delete entries from this log. Entries older than 18 months will auto-delete themselves. These entries are useful for both informational and debugging purposes. In case you are concerned about space, not to worry, they do not occupy more than 10MB of space :-)

The earthquake detection feature of the app is the citizen science project (on Android phones only), where the accelerometer on your phone is monitored for earthquake like signals and fed into the Berkeley Seismology Lab for earthquake research. You may disable this feature by swiping off the notification from your notification tray. If that wasn't successful, you may disable it by going to the app settings and turning on the battery saving mode, ie, Settings -> Battery saving mode -> ON

Although MyShake was originally created in order to research the viability of using smartphone accelerometer data for earthquake alerting, this activity is still in the research phase.

In order to deliver earthquake early warning, MyShake uses a system called ShakeAlert. ShakeAlert uses a network of traditional seismic stations to detect the onset of earthquakes. There are systems similar to ShakeAlert in other countries like Japan, China, Mexico etc., countries that have invested in the installation of a dense network of seismic stations. Unfortunately, many countries (such as Türkiye) do not have such capabilities yet.