Moshpits at a metal festival set off smartwatch emergency alerts

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Moshpits at a metal festival set off smartwatch emergency alerts

Ana Zirojević 2025-06-19

Moshpits at metal festivals might be fun and exhilarating, but they’ve caused unexpected problems for public services due to setting off smartwatch emergency alerts, leading the police in one UK city to issue warnings about them.

Indeed, the police in Leicestershire, a city where the popular Download Festival takes place every year, last week made a public plea for the visitors to put their smartwatches on ‘airplane mode’ or disable emergency alerts on them, per a June 14 post on social media.

A metal festival or a head-on collision?

As the police explained, the wearable tech would perceive the wearer’s activity inside a moshpit as having suffered a collision, causing it to make 999 emergency calls and abandon them, leading to a waste of time and effort on the side of emergency services. Specifically:

“In previous years, due to wearable tech issues, we saw a rise of nearly 700 extra 999 calls in a weekend. The tech assumed that people in mosh pits had been in a collision, causing 999 contacts and abandoned 999 calls.”

Because the services had to assess each and every one of these calls, “with three outbound call attempts completed to ensure there is no threat, risk, or harm, taking our contact handlers away from answering true emergency calls,” the police said.

In addition to turning on the ‘airplane mode’ and disabling the alerts, the post recommended answering the emergency services’ callbacks from hidden numbers to let them know the caller was safe.

Leicestershire police plea for Download Festival goers

Elsewhere, wearable tech may help save lives in an earthquake, as Google has just added a real-time quake alert system to Wear OS, which provides warnings about seismic activity and was previously only present on Android phones, and will launch alongside Google Play Services version 25.21.

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Ana Zirojević Crypto journalist and market analyst with 7+ years of experience covering digital assets, blockchain technology, and data-driven market analysis.