The Hawaii Missile Alert Was the Software Developer's Fault
Tags: news
Published: 2018-01-15 14:52:02

---
title: "The Hawaii Missile Alert Was the Software Developer's Fault"
published: true
description: "From a drop-down menu, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.”"
tags: news
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/a017d1i7y1spt0r5a40n.png
---

The employee who accidentally triggered the missile alert on Saturday [pushed the wrong button](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/14/hawaii-missile-alert-how-one-employee-pushed-the-wrong-button-and-caused-a-wave-of-panic/?utm_term=.74ea7eac546c). It was a disastrous mistake that sent Americans panicking and running for shelter. Needless to say this is the kind of accident that should be avoided at all costs. Check out this passage from the linked Washington Post article. The emphasis is mine.

> Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. **From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.”** He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert.

That's right. The person who made triggered the alert did so by selecting from a dropdown menu and picking the wrong one. That is not a human error, that is a software design error. Failing to account for this incident is absolutely negligent. I'm not sure what other people do, but when I'm designing interfaces with potentially destructive consequences, I do so with _a lot of fucking care_.

On this website [dev.to](/), a community platform where software developers share posts like the one you are currently reading, admins have a few internal interfaces for performing fairly destructive behavior. One action we might take is banning someone for spam. In doing so, we take down all the bad actor's posts and comments and disallow them from signing up to do so again. This is what that button looks like in our backend:

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8euqck78zwsr1qqnqo86.png)

It's not even _that_ destructive. We can recover this data if needed.

Furthermore, that screen is only accessible when the user qualifies to have this action taken on them. If I visit the same page for most users, I get this message where that button would be:

![](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/k5ri4d0uffmybp3r82se.png)

This means the admin has to perform all the actions manually. A time-consuming activity nobody could possibly do by accident.

The consequences of us making mistakes are minimal. The worst case is a bit of lost data. Something we badly don't want to do, but ultimately not that big a deal. Alerting a nation that it is under attack is a _huge_ deal. Software developers cannot ship interfaces that make this sort of human error possible. If the mistake can be made, it will eventually be made. We call this type of error "fat fingering" and it happens all the time.

Sure, the designers and developers that created the button weren't the ones that pressed it, but this disaster was their fault. It was not the pusher's negligence or their training system. Mistakes happen, I make them all the time and so do you, but let's learn from this one and write better software.

_Shameless plug because this post is getting a lot of fly-by social traffic:_

If you're still a lurker on our platform, I'd recommend taking a minute to create your account right now. There's a lot to be gained from being part of our dev community and we'd love to have you. 🙏❤️