Turkey earthquake: Did Google fail to alert millions? Here is what the company says

Tech giant Google acknowledged that its earthquake alert system failed to issue critical warnings ahead of the devastating 2023 earthquake in Turkey, which claimed more than 55,000 lives and injured over 100,000 people.

Although the Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) system was active at the time of the twin quakes on 6 February, it failed to recognise the scale of the threat.

Just 469 people received the system’s highest-level “Take Action” alert, designed to prompt urgent safety measures, though there were almost 10 million people living within 98 miles of the epicenter.

Instead, Google said that around half a million users were issued a lower-level “Be Aware” notification, intended for milder tremors and far less noticeable. This alert does not override settings like Do Not Disturb and would likely have gone unnoticed by most, especially as the first quake struck at 4:17am while many were asleep.

The Android-powered system, which operates on over 70% of smartphones in Turkey, initially led Google to claim that it had “performed well,” BBC reported.

Internal findings, however, revealed the system had dramatically underestimated the quake’s magnitude, assessing it at just 4.5 to 4.9 on the moment magnitude scale, when in fact it was a 7.8.

A second large tremor later that day also saw inaccuracies.

This time, AEA issued 8,158 “Take Action” alerts and almost four million “Be Aware” warnings, still falling short of expectations given the quake’s severity.

“We continue to improve the system based on what we learn in each earthquake,” a Google spokesperson told the BBC.

The AEA platform uses the accelerometers in Android phones to detect ground movement, aiming to give users precious seconds to react before seismic waves arrive. When a strong quake is detected, the system should trigger the loud “Take Action” alert, which bypasses all other settings and fills the user’s screen.

This feature was particularly vital in Turkey, where lives could have been saved had people received a timely warning before buildings collapsed. Yet, months of BBC reporting across the quake zone failed to uncover a single user who had received the more serious alert ahead of the first tremor.

Google has since published a study in the journal Science, admitting to “limitations to the detection algorithms”.

Researchers later ran a revised simulation of the 7.8 magnitude quake, which produced a dramatically different result: 10 million “Take Action” alerts and 67 million “Be Aware” notifications, suggesting the issue lay in the original software design.

“Every earthquake early warning system grapples with the same challenge—tuning algorithms for large magnitude events,” Google said.

But the long delay in revealing these flaws has raised concerns among experts.

“I’m really frustrated that it took so long,” said Elizabeth Reddy, assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines. “We're not talking about a little event - people died - and we didn't see a performance of this warning in the way we would like.”

Some scientists are also worried that countries may be relying too heavily on Google’s alerts, potentially neglecting the development of strong public systems.

“Would some places make the calculation that Google’s doing it, so we don’t have to?” asked Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. “I think being very transparent about how well it works is absolutely critical.”

Google maintains that its platform is intended to support, not replace, national alert systems.

Since the 2023 quake, it has updated the algorithm and expanded AEA to 98 countries.