Google Alerts warned of 11.4 million magnitude earthquakes in Venezuela

Venezuela does not have a national earthquake warning system. However, moments before two powerful earthquakes struck on Wednesday, millions of phones lit up. The company says Google earthquake alerts reached 11.4 million people, buying some of them up to two minutes to act.

The warnings came from Google’s earthquake alert system, which turns regular Android phones into a vast network of earthquake sensors. The New York Times tracked how the system worked during the disaster.

Jose Flores was driving his family to the movies in Caracas when his wife’s phone rang. Six seconds later, the ground began to shake. “It almost seemed to predict the earthquake,” he said.

Telephones and seismographs

The trick is the accelerometer found inside almost every smartphone. The same slide that rotates your screen can feel the faint tremor of a seismic wave. Google clicks on more than two billion of them worldwide.

An earthquake sends out two types of waves. Fast elemental waves arrive first and do little damage. This is followed by slower secondary waves, which cause most of the shaking. The gap between them is the warning window.

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Primary waves travel at a speed of about four miles per second. Secondary waves move at about half that speed. A digital alert could win the race, because it travels at almost the speed of light. This is how the phone can warn you before the worst of the vibration hits you.

A fixed phone near the earthquake senses the early waves. It sends an anonymous signal and approximate location to Google’s servers. Servers collect data from many phones, confirm that the earthquake is real, and then send alerts faster than the damaging waves can travel.

How Venezuela’s alerts unfolded

Within three seconds, phones picked up the initial waves of the first quake, said Mark Stogaitis, a principal engineer at Google. Six seconds later, the system sent its first warnings. The warning area then grew as the earthquake increased.

The timing was brutal. A 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck first, then a 7.5-magnitude earthquake occurred about 39 seconds later. The second attack was the strongest to hit Venezuela since 1900, and both events killed hundreds. Google said its system reads the interfering waves as one large event.

Distance decides who benefits. People farthest from the epicenter get the most warning. Those closest to you often feel the vibration before any notification arrives.

Three levels of warning

Google sends alerts for earthquakes of magnitude 4.5 and above. The lighter tells users to be aware. A louder voice tells them to get ready. The most dangerous one, called a “take action,” beeps and urges people to get down and take cover. Nearly 1.4 million of those maximum alerts have been issued in Venezuela.

A safety net for the Global South

This is where order matters most. Japan, Mexico, Canada, and the United States operate their own networks of buried sensors. These alerts arrive on both iPhone and Android by default. Many poor countries cannot afford such networks, and this is a gap that Google fills with phones people already own.

The reach is huge. About 70% of the world’s smartphones run Android, so the network extends almost everywhere. Google began alerts in 2021 in New Zealand, Greece and Turkey, and by 2023 it covered 98 countries. A research paper published in 2025 in the journal Science explained this method.

The system has limits. Phones must remain stationary until they sense the quake, and the closest users may not get a useful time delay. It cannot predict earthquakes, but only detects them when they start.

Why does it matter?

Early warning itself is not new. Do this without the need for dedicated hardware. Google has built a planet-wide sensor network of consumer gadgets, at no cost to the people who carry them. It’s a rare case where Google’s domain serves public safety rather than advertising.

It is too early to know whether the alerts have saved lives in Venezuela. However, even a few seconds can be enough to work. Most agencies are asking people to get down, take cover and hold on before the shaking starts. For Flores, the lesson stuck. He said that next time he would know the meaning of the sound.

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