I had heard about this in passing but apparently hoaxes or false alarms are happening at colleges all over the country. I wasn't familiar with the term but they suspect it could be "swatting" where groups of people, possibly foreign agents spoof information or reports of threats and evaluate response times, lockdown/evacuation methods, etc.

We just experienced this first-hand. An alert was just sent to students at UTSA this evening of a threat and had students/staff evacuate the building. It sounds very similar to what other campuses have experienced.

This is a problem because it leads to "alert fatigue" and complacency. You see this elsewhere - amber alerts, natural disasters

They do something similar in hospitals believe it or not.
They'll call a Code Blue, and the resuscitation team which usually includes one of us ER docs runs to the room, usually all the way across the other side of the hospital from the ER, only to find it was a "mock code" and they were checking times and how long it took you to get there....

I can understand the utility.. kind of like throwing a doll in the pool for lifeguards, but pulling a team out of a busy ER takes us away from people who actually need us.