On Friday April 7th, 18 minutes before midnight, every single one of Dallas’s 156 emergency weather sirens started going off. Thousands of people flooded the Dallas 911 system, leaving people with real emergencies waiting on the line.
After nearly an hour of the sirens going off officials had decided that the only way to fix the noise was to unplug the radio systems and the repeater.
Officials have ruled that it was a hacker form the Dallas area and a remote hack- telling reporters someone gained physical access to a hub connecting all the sirens. By hijacking the signal going into the transmitter, the hacker seemingly managed to trigger all of the sirens at once. The siren system is old, the city council manager said, but the issues that allowed the sirens to be attacked were patched over the weekend.