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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.

By default, the system will notify you of earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or greater anywhere in the world.

These are normal notifications of an earthquake that has already happened, not early warning alerts.

You may visit the Settings->Custom Earthquake Notifications page to add/modify/enable/disable or alter the magnitude of these notifications.

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

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 citizen science feature of the app by going to the app settings, ie, Settings -> Battery saving mode -> ON

MyShake will send the following notifications to our users in California, Oregon and Washington.

• A pre-drill notification on Thursday, October 10th at ~10:17am
• A pre-drill notification on Wednesday, October 16th at ~10:17am
• The Great ShakeOut TEST ALERT on Thursday, October 17th at ~10:17am

Your readiness to receive the ShakeOut drill is the same as your readiness to receive live earthquake alerts, ie, Set your Homebase

If you did not receive the first pre-drill notification, the easiest remedy is to delete your Homebase and to re-add it. This procedure will trigger our system to add you (in case you were missed the first time).

This is how a test alert looks and plays:

The test will be sent as a normal notification (not as critical alert) and will therefore be suppressed if your phone is in silent or do-not-disturb setting.

The real/live alert will be sent as a critical alert and will punch through your do-not-disturb settings.

Sorry you cannot opt out. However, the test alert is sent as a non-critical alert, so if you do not wish to hear it, please set your phone to silent.

The TEST alert is not the Earthquake Early Warning alert, powered by ShakeAlert, which are high-priority critical alerts. The TEST alert is sent as a normal notification.

This type of alert does not break through do-not-disturb or audio settings. If you didn’t hear the alert, your phone might have been set in silent mode or low volume. If you did not receive the alert, please verify that your app is up to date. It is also likely that a small percentage of the phones (among millions) did not receive this less-urgent notification due to network congestion and/or network connectivity issues in some locations. Finally, if this particular alert could not be delivered within 10 minutes, it would not be attempted anymore, so as not to disturb people past a 10 minute window.

If you like, we can send you a private early warning alert to verify that your phone can receive alerts. Please send us the app debug info by following the screenshots in this FAQ answer.