Hundreds of residents of Lake Worth were suddenly notified on Sunday night that there was a zombie invasion underway, The Palm Beach Post reports.
According to the newspaper, about 7,880 residents who were affected by a power outage at about 1:45 a.m. local time received a message about a "zombie alert for residents of Lake Worth and Terminus" – the latter apparently being a reference to a location from The Walking Dead TV show.
"There are now far less than seven thousand three hundred and eighty customers involved due to extreme zombie activity. Restoration time uncertain," the notice said.
As city spokesman Ben Kerr explained, during a power outage the system automatically sends out a short pre-recorded message so that people affected by the problem can see what’s going on.
He added that there are "literally thousands" of such pre-recorded messages, and that apparently somebody altered one of them.
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"At some point, some edits were made and that’s what you saw. Someone edited it with a zombie invasion going on," he said, adding that the city administration has already determined that the tampering wasn’t done by an employee or ex-staffer.
"Now the system has been scrubbed and there will be no further zombie messaging until the actual zombie investigation comes," Kerr said.
On January, 13 an alert about an incoming ballistic missile sent people in Hawaii into a panic for more than 30 minutes, until local officials managed to calm everyone down and announced that the signal had been sent by mistake.