Hawaiian Governor David Ige has admitted that there was a delay in notifying the public about the false missile alert earlier this month as he did not know the password of his Twitter account.
The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency issued the threat alarm at 8:07 a.m. on January 13 and two minutes after the alert was sent across the state, Ige was told that it was a false one.
However, his social media pages were not updated with the information until 8:24 a.m., more than 15 minutes after the alert.
On Monday, after he gave the State of the State address reporters demanded an explanation for that long silence, according to the Washington Post.
"I have to confess that I don't know my Twitter account log-ons and the passwords, so certainly that's one of the changes that I've made. I've been putting that on my phone so that we can access the social media directly," Ige said.
In addition to this, he also did not post a correction on Facebook until 23 minutes after the alert went out.
On January 13, Hawaiian citizens received an emergency alert on their phones that read, "BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."
Approximately 38 minutes following the alert, the Hawaii authority took to Twitter to inform that there was, "NO missile threat" to the state.
The White House issued a statement on the false alarm, noting that United States President Donald Trump had been briefed on the incident.
"This was purely a state exercise," the statement added.
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