LAX Emergency Sign ‘Please Evacuate’ Blunder

A Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) emergency warning in the Tom Bradley International Terminal rattled a few nerves shortly before 10 pm on Monday night. Several passengers pointed out to staff that the monitor system behind the ticket counters carried a sinister warning: “An emergency has been declared in the terminal. Please evacuate.”

There wasn’t any emergency, and no one was asked to leave. Instead, within the first hour of the event, local media was reporting that authorities were looking for the hackers who had created the scary message.

The warning itself was removed within seven minutes of being posted.

Apparently, LAX officials were on high alert about hackers messing with signs. The Los Angeles Times noted that an electronic sign near the University of Southern California had been hacked earlier this month to flash a message about the infamous Los Angeles Police Department. The details of the obscene message were considerably more graphic than the LAX message, so it isn’t clear why they would have put the two events together.

Sorry for the crude imagery, but the USC sign flashed: “LAPD Anal Probe. Guard Your B******e.” Photos of the sign were tweeted around to the general amusement of USC students. At least one pretty girl offered to buy the unknown hacker a drink.

As you might guess from the humorless nature of the Monday message, there wasn’t any genuine hacking emergency at LAX. Airport operations has now released a statement that a third party contractor was performing tests on the sign when he accidentally triggered the evacuation message.

Oops.

The terse statement concluded: “The airport’s Information Technology staff will be looking at ways to ensure this accident does not happen again in the future.”

The LAX emergency sign blunder suggests that people may read the monitor, but they’re not about to leave the airport just on a sign’s say-so.

[LAX airport landing photo by Motohide Miwa via Wikipedia Commons]