How to Turn Off Severe Weather Alerts on the Galaxy S5

If you’re like me you’ve probably been shocked or woke up in the middle of the night by your Samsung Galaxy S5 making some awfully loud noises and vibrating like it had turned into a Transformer. Most likely you just received a severe weather alert or emergency notification. They’re good to have, but you may also want to disable and turn them all off.

Emergency alerts or severe weather warnings are sent to wireless devices from an array of different sources. Most being government officials, local and state safety agencies, FEMA, the FCC, the National Weather Service or even Homeland Security. Yes, your Galaxy S5 gets Presidential alerts too, and that’s the only alert that cannot be disabled.

Read: How to Use the Galaxy S5 Fingerprint Scanner

When a big storm is headed your way you probably will want to know about it, nor should you just shut off the alert and go back to sleep like I’ve done in the past as explained above. While these alerts are for our safety and should be left enabled, if you want to turn them off we’ll explain how to do so below.

All Samsung Galaxy devices have emergency or severe weather alerts and notifications. Most smartphones in general do, but Samsung’s seem to be the most abrupt and loud. The first time it happened I almost had a heart attack, which won’t help if I’m about to get caught in an awful storm at the same time.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 (and most Galaxy devices) have four kinds of alerts. Presidential, Extreme, Severe, and AMBER alerts. All of them but one can be disabled for those curious.

Read: How to take a Screenshot on the Galaxy S5

Again, we’d recommend you leave these all enabled for your own safety, but to each his own. It’s your smartphone and you can do as you’d like. Plus, if the weather alerts keep waking you up and you just want to disable them, and them only, below is exactly how to do it.

Instructions

Oddly enough controlling the emergency and weather alerts on the Samsung Galaxy S5 are managed through the text messaging application simply called “Messaging”. Users will need to head to the stock messaging app, then tap the three dots in the top right corner which is the menu button. This brings up a menu of options, and you’ll need to navigate to settings.

Messaging > Settings > scroll halfway down to Emergency Alerts

From here you can manage the alerts, play a preview (why would anyone want to hear that god-awful sound again) or turn off the reminders. The first option “Emergency Alerts” is where you’ll navigate. This menu shows all the alerts you can receive, and the checkboxes are all you need to interact with. Simply uncheck whatever alert you’d rather not receive, and you’re done. It’s that easy.

Presidential alerts cannot be disabled, but that aside users can turn off Extreme, Severe, and AMBER alerts should they choose to. Uncheck all the boxes and you’re done. There’s nothing else to it. You can now rest at ease, knowing that emergency tone won’t wake you up in the middle of a sweet dream again.

Severe alerts are usually the only ones I get, which are mostly for incoming weather, so that’s what I’ve disabled myself. The others are on in case of an AMBER alert, the zombie apocalypse, or any other extreme emergency.

You are all done. You’ve now successfully disabled any of those alerts that were keeping you awake at night, or going off at the wrong time and making a ton of noise. For more details on your smartphone check out our Galaxy S5 How to Portal.