SOUTH CAROLINA (WBTW) – An emergency alert sent to cell phones throughout South Carolina on Tuesday evening caused the South Carolina Emergency Management Division (SCEMD) website to crash temporarily.
SCEMD issued a wireless emergency alert for the coronavirus. It read, “Public Safety Alert: Non-essential businesses to close. Please stay home. Stop the spread of COVID19” and included a link to SCEMD.org.
The agency says its website subsequently received 650 hits a second from unique users, which is ten times more traffic than any incident the agency has ever activated for, including hurricanes. This resulted in the website crashing. It is now up again as of 8:30 p.m. Tuesday.
On Tuesday afternoon, Governor Henry McMaster ordered many non-essential businesses to close.
On Monday evening, McMaster announced all public beach accesses would close. News13’s Tori Gessner asked the spokesperson for Myrtle Beach about the order on Tuesday.
