A petrifying “wartime alert” sent to Seoul residents’ phones on Wednesday morning turned out to have been a “false alarm,” South Korean authorities said. Air raid sirens sounded throughout the capital as locals were sent an official message telling them to be “prepared to evacuate and allow children and the elderly to evacuate first.” A formal evacuation order was issued soon after, only for the order to be scrapped around 10 minutes later. It turned out that the panic had been sparked by the failed rocket launch of North Korea’s first spy satellite, which South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said crashed in the Yellow Sea.