Hello all!
I just got back from church and I heard the craziest thing: the EAS went off! During Holy Communion (we were in the middle of that,) the iPhone EAS alarm (from multiple peoples’ iPhones) spooked us all randomly! I normally leave my phone at home during church and I got the alert when my phone was at home. Speaking to the priest after the service, I learned that a flash flood warning was issued via the EAS. Quite a random interruption to a normal church service!
One of the few things silencing your phone evidently does not do - which is good if there’s a severe event going on and you need everyone to know about it ASAP, but not ideal in a setting where silence and reverence is required. Just another one of those things to tune out, I guess - like screaming children!
However, music was playing during Communion at the service, which mainly blocked out the EAS alarms. But, these peoples’ phone should have remained on “Silent!”
Upon googling it, at least iPhones are designed to ignore that they are on silent whenever an alert comes in, so even if your phone is on silent it’ll still go off. The only way around that is to turn your phone off. There’s a setting on Android phones that lets you disable the feature, but you have to go through the settings to get to it. So most people probably haven’t changed the settings.