Some ceiticism is justified. A missing child is an emergency, no doubt. However, within the category of emergencies, there are varying levels of urgency. The cell phone emergency alert system has different levels of urgency, but Canada's implementation always uses the highest level, called "Presidential". Have you ever heard the expression, "if everything is high priority, then nothing is high priority?"

I'm not sure that waking a sleeping person is helpful to the goal of returning a child home safely. However, a sleeping person probably should be woken up if, for example:

• a tornado, wildfire, or hurricaine is heading towards them

• there's an armed and dangerous person in their area

• another nation has launched an attack in their area

My concern is that people are finding ways to mute sounds on all alerts just to avoid having their sleep disturbed by emergent but not top-urgency alerts like missing children alerts, and they may miss missing children alerts during their waking hours as well, or even be put at risk in the case of natural disaster, dangerous manhunt, or foreign attack – the intended use case for the highest, Presidential priority of alert.

I suppose one benefit of waking everyone up could be that someone saw something earlier, and contacts authorities with the information they have sooner, rather than waking up and seeing the alert in the morning.

I'm curious to know your thoughts. Do you think it's more helpful than harmful to have missing children alerts sent on the highest possible priority? I'm keeping an open mind here.

Over here in Ontario province wide amber alerts are sent out a few times a year. Usually in the middle of the night.

I ended up needing to mute the sound on the alerts because there was never anything I could do at 2am, and that way I could still see the alert in the morning.

But now I also don't get the tornado alerts...

It's perfectly valid for people to be frustrated with a good idea that was poorly implemented. The alert system in phones support the ability to have different levels of alerts. But the mobile carriers in Canada didn't want to support that, so instead every alert is sent out at the highest level.