Emergency Alerts are a fairly new feature built into iPhones and Android phones and today in the United Kingdom Government has sent a test alert to every single phone in the country which looked quite like this…

Even if your phone was on silent or locked, you’d have had a 10 second siren and this test message.

Now, whilst this could be a really helpful system for a lot of people and for a lot of emergencies there are also reasons why perhaps you might not want this to go off on your iPhone.

Perhaps you have a second device that you don’t want people to know about or know where it lives, or perhaps the actual alert itself is quite alarming.

To stop it happening again all I’m going to do is go into the Settings app and then tap onto Notifications.

From here you need to scroll right down to the bottom (which is quite a long way if you’ve got a lot of apps installed!) until you see the two options for Severe Alerts and Extreme Alerts.

You can choose if you want to turn both of these off, or one of them, and they’ll both apply to different things.

Perhaps a severe weather warning might class was a Severe Alert but perhaps an unfolding emergency situation in your local area or in the whole country – that might count as an Extreme Alert.

So you can choose which ones you want on here and you can rest assured those alerts won’t come up again if you’ve disabled them.