Anything that even remotely smacks of digitalisation and/or public communications in the Bulgaria of the 2020s must be taken with a (very large) pinch of salt, Bulgarians joke in the wake of a contentious BG Alert testing in October.
"A success by all means," an advisor to the interior minister proclaimed, adding as many as 98 percent of smartphone owners in Bulgaria got a test message from the system. Trouble is, very few of them realised they did, owing to, according to Interior Ministry sources, most smartphones' settings switching off test alerts by default.
Originally, the test messaging was planned for 1 October, but was postponed with the "situation in the Middle East" being offered as an excuse. It remained unclear to the general public what the ongoing war in the Middle East had to do with the Bulgarian warning system for floods, fires and so on.
There have been cases of major failures of the BG Alert network in the past. In the summer a village in southeastern Bulgarian almost burned to the ground because the BG Alert system failed. The explanation provided at the time was that it could not have worked as local network transmitters were out of power.
A year earlier the gaffe of the BG Alert system was even grander. Many people's smartphones started emitting emergency signals without saying what they were meant to be about. And some smartphone owners reported they got a text message saying it came from... the president. The Office of the Bulgarian President had to disseminate clarifications it had nothing to do with the failed "test."
The nerds running BG Alert have appeared to be so pathetic in their attempts to get a relatively simple digital platform to run that they prompted the sarcasm of media hacks. The ill-fated emergency warning system mirrors the overall situation in the country, Mediapool concluded, and went on to say: Ostensibly, it appears to be OK. It fails to function in real life. Yet the people being paid to run it claim success.
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