
Hawaii fires employee who sent false ballistic missile alert - aaronbrethorst
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16952202/hawaii-false-ballistic-missile-alert
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pragmar
So Governor Ige claimed the employee pushed the wrong buttons and followed up
with the screen capture showing how confusing the menu system was. With the
story having changed dramatically to a misinformed, intentional alert, the
state government has burned their credibility. If there's anything to learn
here, it'll come from the federal investigation.

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nathantotten
The obvious comparison for the HN crowd is the gitlab database outage last
year. Fascinating to see how they responded compared to the government of
Hawaii. [https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-
database-o...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-
outage-of-january-31/)

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motive
How to ensure a mistake is repeated: fire the one guy who will never make the
same mistake twice.

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danso
According to officials, this is his third strike:

> _State officials also revealed that the employee who was terminated on
> Friday “has performance issues,” and had confused drills with real-world
> events in at least two previous incidents. The report said colleagues had
> complained about such issues in the past._

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nathantotten
I’m not totally convinced that absolves the system/UX. It seems more like an
excuse/justification.

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danso
Yeah, we don't know the whole story. It's not impossible that this is a
situation involving both systemic flaws and someone who is just intractably
and unapologetically incompetent -- for instance, someone who has habitually
browsed non-work-related websites and been warned against doing so, but the
harm of the distraction was never actually a danger until this fake alert
incident.

For me, what partially redeems this employee's firing is that the head
administrator was also terminated. If this "button-pusher" deserves to be
punished for incompetence, then whoever thought it was OK to have such an
incompetent person pushing the button also deserves to be punished.

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prepend
How do you repeatedly mistake a drill for real-life? The source was unclear
whether this person had a mental break (weird but understandable) or s/he
actually had some source saying a missile was inbound. The latter would be so
interesting as to what convinced the person of the missile.

This explains why the button pusher wouldn’t cooperate with the investigation.

Also good to see that responsible managers were also canned / disciplined.

Can’t wait for the bunch of articles talking about UX wasn’t the problem and
there’s no correcting for insane users.

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moioci
The FCC report said that the message that was played as part of a drill said
something like, "Exercise Exercise Exercise [Missile inbound message] This is
not a drill. Exercise Exercise Exercise." So it was contradictory. But
everyone else figured it out.

