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At 11:42 p.m. Friday night, all 156
sirens in the City of Dallas were activated. The Office of Emergency
Management, OEM, immediately began to go through various protocols to turn the
sirens off. By 1:17 a.m., OEM was successful in deactivating the entire outdoor
warning siren system. OEM worked with engineers throughout the night to
determine what triggered the sirens.
We can state at this time that the City’s
siren system was hacked Friday night. For security reasons, we cannot discuss
the details of how this was done, but we do believe that the hack came from the
Dallas area. We have notified the FCC for assistance in identifying the source
of this hack. We are putting in safeguards to ensure this type of hack does not
happen again.
Right now, our priority is to work on
reactivating our system. We won’t know the health of our sirens until we
reactivate the system. We ask residents
to be patient with us in case the sirens sound again during re-activation and please
do not call 911 or 311 for concerns about sirens.
Please monitor the City of Dallas and Dallas
OEM on Twitter or Facebook, because we issue a public notice via social media
when we’re about to test sirens. Siren testing is only done at noon on the
first Wednesday of each month, weather permitting.
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