A KC area Blue Alert linked to X, but not everyone had access. What happened?
Kansas City area residents across the metro were met with the sound of a Wireless Emergency Alert June 2 after the Missouri State Highway Patrol, and later the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, issued Blue Alerts following the shooting of a law enforcement officer in Lee’s Summit.
But some Missouri residents who received the alert on their phones quickly became frustrated. Why? The alert included a link to X, formerly Twitter, that should have led them to more information. While the link worked for some, it didn’t work for others.
On Facebook, residents took to the comment section of the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s post on the alert to express their frustrations. User Joanna Carrell said all she could see was a post from February 2021 about wireless emergency alerts.
“You may already be aware, but when you send your alerts to everyone’s phones, the link in the alert goes to your page on X. For everyone who doesn’t have an account on X, the only thing you can see there is your post from Feb 5, 2021. It might be more helpful if the link in your alerts went to a page that all citizens could see, and explained what the alert was about,” Carrell wrote.
“Same complaint as many — let’s not have an alert redirect you to X with no way to read it,” wrote user Jade Silvey, who took issue with needing an X account to access the post.
Another user, Valerie Naas Hatcher, indicated the link hadn’t taken her anywhere.
“I will also add that I received the alert on my phone, tried to click on the link and nothing happened,” she wrote.
Information on the Blue Alert was also published on moalerts.mo.gov and on Facebook.
But the main concern of some commenters was that the X link included in the alert, which was the most direct way for residents to access the Blue Alert information, wasn’t working for them, or didn’t allow them to access the information without an X account. Officials say a glitch was to blame in this case, but also point out that utilizing social media to distribute mass alerts is the best way to ensure the information gets out without crashing their websites.
‘Equally concerning’
For residents like Yahweh Kent of Lee’s Summit, the frustration was that the alert linked to X at all.
“My concern was primarily that the alert was pretty serious, and it was only connected directly to X. Since not everyone has X for various reasons, it seemed to me that it wasn’t an effective way to communicate something as important and time sensitive as a fugitive that was armed and dangerous,” Kent said.
Kent said he saw the Blue Alert as “equally concerning” as alerts regarding missing and abducted children or severe weather. He doesn’t know why a social media site was linked in this alert when the same, he says, is not done for other alerts.
“I’m not a tech guy, but it seems to me if they can send out Amber Alerts that are not directly attached to limited social media sites, they could use the same system for something like this,” Kent said.
But the highway patrol does use the same system for Amber Alerts and Blue Alerts, said Lieutenant Eric Brown, a spokesperson for the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Both Amber Alerts and Blue Alerts will include links to the @MSHPAlerts X page where residents can find flyers, photos and updated information on active alerts once that information is gathered, according to a flyer published on the @MSHPAlerts page.
In this case, that link to @MSHPAlerts did not operate correctly for some users. For those who were directed to @MSHPAlerts, they were unable to see the post about the Blue Alert. Brown said that the Blue Alert information was published to the @MSHPAlerts page when the Blue Alert was issued.
Kent said he feels that using X “may have put people in danger.”
“Not all people have X so sending an alert that only goes to X doesn’t help people. My wife doesn’t have it even as an app on her phone, so she couldn’t connect without downloading it. People shouldn’t be forced to sign up for a social media site to get news that may, infact, endanger their wellbeing,” he said.
An ‘industry standard’
Both Kansas and Missouri have websites dedicated to disseminating information about Amber Alerts. For Missouri, this also includes active Blue Alerts. However, neither the Kansas Bureau of Investigation nor the Missouri State Highway Patrol link to these websites in the wireless emergency alerts they send out, and they say it’s for good reason.
While the alert in Kansas did not provide the X link, linking to X has become an “industry standard,” according Melissa Underwood, a spokesperson for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
She says the social media platform has the ability to handle the traffic that comes with an emergency alert, something the state website cannot. Both Underwood and Brown expressed that increased traffic brought on by an alert would crash the state alert websites.
“The amount of traffic that would come to the standard style website immediately, all at once, what you have when you run into with Blue Alerts, Amber Alerts, the systems just aren’t built to maintain that much activity on,” Brown said.
But the alerting agencies, including the KBI, have faced challenges amid repeated changes to the X platform, Underwood said. The changes have caused interruptions to accessing posts and pages. The KBI links to individual posts in an attempt to bypass a log-in interruption.
“It’s been kind of an ongoing process that alerting agencies have dealt with because they want to use X because it can withstand all of that traffic, all of those users hitting ... without crashing, but again their link may not have worked quite right,” she said.
There was an error “on the X side” with the link included in the Blue Alert, said Brown. However, it is unclear what exactly caused the link to not function properly.
X is the only platform that allows law enforcement to use links without requiring individuals who open them to have an account, he said.
“It functioned correctly later on, after the original issue of alert, but it was at a point in time where people weren’t clicking on it as frequently, you know, to access that information. I understand at this point that it was resolved, you know, prior to the individual being taken in custody,” Brown said.
What can you do?
Alerting agencies continually look to see what ways they can better improve their processes to make information more accessible, according to officials. Those talks are both internal and with partnering state and federal agencies, Brown says.
“We do communicate and work on the best policies and best procedures to seamlessly get this information out quickly and also have it accessible to those who need it most,” he said.
When the public encounters failed links, Brown encourages individuals to look to other resources like the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Facebook page, the MSHP General Headquarters X page, or moalerts.mo.gov for more information about an alert.
Kansas residents can visit the Kansas Amber Alert website or X page for more information about missing and abducted children. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s Facebook page and Instagram also updates about statewide alerts. Brown also points to local media as a resource.
“Just because one link fails doesn’t mean the information isn’t accessible in multiple other ways,” Brown said.
This story was originally published June 17, 2025 at 11:11 AM.
