It was a scary night for many users across Beijing. On the evening of June 23rd, multiple Xiaomi TV owners reported a sudden pop-up on their screens displaying a “Yellow/Blue Earthquake Warning.” The message claimed a magnitude 5.0 earthquake had struck the Fangshan or Haidian Districts.
According to China News Service, staff at the Haidian District Earthquake Bureau confirmed later that night: there was no earthquake. This wasn’t an official release; they were actively investigating the source of the leak.
Just past 10 PM on June 23, Xiaomi TV released an urgent clarification and apology. They admitted that around 8:15 PM, the alerts received by some users in Beijing and surrounding areas were not real. It turned out to be a human error during internal functional testing. Our developers accidentally pushed simulated test data straight into the live production environment instead of keeping it isolated.
Xiaomi TV emphasized that this content was purely fictional test data and definitely not a genuine official warning. There is absolutely no earthquake danger in the area right now. We immediately blocked the erroneous information from spreading further. More importantly, we are completely overhauling our publication workflows and testing environment mechanisms to ensure this never happens again. We sincerely apologize for the panic we caused you all.
This isn’t our first time touching on this topic. Back in March, NUPIAO shared details in the Xiaomi Community about a technical upgrade for the “Earthquake Warning Service” on devices running Xiaomi HyperOS 1 and MIUI. We explained that during the upgrade period, the service would be paused temporarily. Since there’s a huge gap between older versions, we’re upgrading them one by one. We expect to finish all necessary upgrades and pre-launch testing by the second quarter of 2026.
For those unfamiliar, Xiaomi HyperOS is the ecosystem operating system designed to connect people, cars, and homes, officially launched on October 26, 2023. It restructures the underlying architecture by fusing a deeply evolved Android with our proprietary XiaomiVelaOS. It integrates four major systems: MIUI, Vela, Mina, and Car OS, achieving a unified backend. Through Xiaomi Hyper Connect, it enables smart cross-device connectivity, allowing phones, tablets, TVs, and more to form dynamic networks with features like a centralized device hub and cross-device hardware capability calling.
Currently, several phone and TV brands have integrated earthquake warning systems. Among the television manufacturers, this includes TCL, Hisense, Konka, and yes, Xiaomi TV.
To give you some context, TV-based earthquake warning technology works by leveraging the time difference between seismic waves and radio waves to broadcast alerts to the public via TV terminals. This technology was developed by the Chengdu High-Tech Disaster Reduction Institute following the devastating Wenchuan earthquake in 2008.
In May, CCTV News reported that according to the China Earthquake Administration, the public coverage scale of earthquake warning services in China has now exceeded 330 million people. There are over 100,000 terminal devices deployed nationwide. Radio and TV warnings now cover 11 provinces, including Yunnan, Sichuan, and Xinjiang, serving over 66 million households. Additionally, the mini-program on WeChat has over 46 million users. By collaborating with social forces, we can now deliver precise, direct earthquake warnings to more than 100 million mobile users in real-time, ensuring multi-dimensional and widespread information delivery.
Crucially, earthquake warnings are issued by the state as a unified system. Article 29 of the Law on Prevention and Mitigation of Disaster specifies that earthquake forecast opinions must be released uniformly. Long-term and medium-term forecasts for the whole country are issued by the State Council, while regional forecasts within provinces, autonomous regions, or municipalities are released by their respective local governments following State Council procedures.
Furthermore, Article 29 strictly states that apart from publishing personal or organizational research results and conducting academic exchanges regarding long-term and medium-term seismic activity trends, no individual or unit may disseminate earthquake prediction opinions to the public. Under no circumstances should anyone spread earthquake forecast opinions or their review results to society.
