All About AMBER Alerts and Emergency Alerts on Your iPhone

If you reside in California, you may have been awakened earlier this week by an alarm going off on your iPhone sometime around 4 AM. What was that God-awful noise? And why did it go off?

AMBER (America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response) Alerts, are named after the late Amber Hagerman, are also known as CAE (Child Abduction Emergency) and are delivered via SMS, or in the iPhone’s case, push notification, when a child has been abducted.

A similar Emergency Alarm is  sent to cellular phones when a local emergency, such as an impending natural disaster is imminent. I was notified last month in this manner when a tornado was sighted near my home here in the Tennessee backwoods.

Apple, in cooperation with wireless carriers works to provide emergency government notifications, including the AMBER and other alerts here in the United States and other countries. The alert is a great feature that can warn you of an impending disaster, or the kidnapping of a child.

If you need to however, the alerts can be turned off on your iPhone. While we here at MacTrast suggest leaving the alerts active, we understand that there may be times when you don’t want to be disturbed. Here’s how to manage the AMBER and emergency alert.

1. From the Home Screen of your iPhone, tap the Settings icon.
2. About halfway down the first settings screen, you’ll see “Notifications,” tap that.
3. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the Notifications” page.
4. Under the “Government Alerts” section, you’ll see an option to turn OFF or ON both the AMBER Alert notifications and the general Emergency Alerts.

Setting the alerts to either ON or OFF is your only option, unfortunately you can’t set the alarms to a customized tone. That is really for the best, because if you have an impending emergency situation, you most likely want to be notified about it in as noticeable a fashion as possible.

AMBER and Emergency Alerts also override the Do Not Disturb, according to users posting in Apple’s Support Community.

For myself, it’s worth the minor inconvenience of being awakened in the night to be aware of an impeding emergency, or of an AMBER Alert when a child has been abducted.

Thanks to iMore for the original article.