Glitches Plague Text Alert System

A campus-wide emergency text message notification system—commonly known as “Message Me”—faced its first major test on Harvard’s Cambridge campus after Monday night’s shooting, but several glitches may have hampered its effectiveness, prompting undergraduate complaints and administrative consideration of possible system modifications yesterday.

At approximately 5:45 pm on Monday, Message Me subscribers received the first of several text messages notifying them of the incident “near Kirkland House on Mt Auburn St.” A later message informed them that Harvard University Police had deemed much of the campus, with the exception of Kirkland and Eliot Houses, safe enough for them to “resume normal activity.”

Message Me was last used to inform members of the Longwood campus—which includes the Medical, Public Health, and Dental Schools—that classes and other activities were suspended due to suspected swine flu cases.

After Monday night’s shooting, students at the College received their first emergency notification since the program’s debut last spring. But not all Message Me subscribers received the texts. Text messages reached about 98 percent of the 14,000 participants in the program, University spokesman Kevin Galvin wrote in an e-mail statement.

But confusion was widespread, both among those who did not receive the texts and those who did.

Many students said they failed to realize the system required them to opt in every year, even if they had signed up for the program in previous years.

“I thought I was registered but wasn’t, so that was pretty surprising when everyone else was like ‘I got a text message,’” said Trevor G. Frankel ’09, who added that 15 to 20 minutes elapsed between when the messages were sent and when he learned of the shooting from other students. “We kind of got lucky that it was a kind of situation where [hearing the news immediately] wasn’t a matter of public safety.”

Students have also reported failure to receive the texts due to poor cell phone reception in the Quad—an issue that the College has been working to resolve, Galvin wrote. Other delays likely resulted from the difference in cell phone service providers among Message Me users, he added.

But another bug affected those who did eventually find the texts on their phones. The second sentence of the messages were truncated to read “Police ask people to remain indoors and avoi—” cutting off the two final words, “the area.”

The error resulted from the Message Me system’s inability to send texts longer than 160 characters, including the message heading, according to Galvin.

University officials conducted a series of meetings yesterday, discussing the performance of the Message Me system, and possible modifications and upgrades, including integrating it with Facebook or Twitter updates.

Following Monday’s incident, the Cambridge Police Department did not send out text messages over a similar notification system put in place for area residents last year, since its activation requires “a series of incidents,” said spokesman James DeFrancesco.

Emily J. Hogan contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.