Secretary Blinken jokes that ‘our Russian friends’ interrupted his event with Wednesday’s emergency alert test

Secretary of State Antony Blinken quipped on Wednesday about the scheduled nationwide emergency alert test as it interrupted his comments about the war in Ukraine, calling it an interruption from “our Russian friends.”

“Here’s the other side of the coin, and here’s fundamentally why it’s so important—” Blinken began to say as the national emergency alert test began to ring on phones.

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Blinken followed up with a joke, “Ah, this might be our Russian friends interrupting us.”

The crowd in attendance of the Clements Center for National Security event at the University of Texas in Austin responded with laughter.

“But I’m glad to know the national alert system works,” he added, invoking more laughter.

Prior to the emergency alert interrupting the sit-down discussion with Blinken and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison, the event’s organizer had warned attendees about the alert that was about to happen.

Paul Edgar, the head of the university’s national security center, implored the crowd to put their phones in “airplane mode.”

“You may be familiar with the nationwide emergency alert test, which is scheduled for about 19 and a half minutes from right now. So that we don’t interrupt the conversation, please put your phones on airplane mode. I have been told that’s the way to go about this. I also recommend that you keep your phone close at hand, not so you can text your friends but so that when you suddenly realize that you didn’t actually put it on airplane mode, you can quickly silence it when it squawks in about 19 minutes,” he said.

Blinken had been discussing with Hutchison the “incredible human tragedy that is the Russian aggression against Ukraine” before the jarring alert went off in the middle of their conversation.

The alert went out across cellphones, TVs, and radios across the country in a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System on Wednesday afternoon. Federal law requires the emergency systems be tested nationwide every three years and the last time was in 2021. The purpose was to assess the effectiveness of the Federal Emergency Management Agency‘s Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts.

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“We had an extremely successful test,” Antwane Johnson, director of FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, said.

The test was a joint effort by FEMA and the Federal Communications Commission to ensure the alert systems worked across the country in case of national emergencies.