Take action now to make sure WatSAFE doesn’t offload from your device 

As part of our review, we identified a problem with WatSAFE offloading on many iOS phones or hibernating on Android devices. After a period of inactivity, operating systems will automatically put apps in a hibernation state, making it unable to deliver push notifications. 

This is common across app providers, and we have worked with the WatSAFE provider to address this issue. 

To make sure that you are able to receive safety alerts, make sure you have the WatSAFE app downloaded to your device. Once you have it installed, or have confirmed it is not offloaded, please follow the steps to disable the app offloading/hibernation settings on both iOS and Android devices.  

You’ll see more test alerts, more often 

To help ensure the app stays active, and to ensure our people remain familiar with how to use WatSAFE, we will also be moving to a monthly testing cycle for our emergency notification system. You should see push notifications on your phone when we test the system, as well as some other alerts on other parts of our emergency notification system, such as digital display screens, and on network-managed computers. 

Monthly testing will start in October. If you have any questions or concerns about this process, please reach out to the IST team