On Thursday evening, a scheduled test of a new citywide emergency alert system took place, 30 to 60 minutes behind schedule, but nonetheless seemingly successfully. Still, it freaked a lot of people out.

The test, which was scheduled for between 5:15 and 5:45 p.m. on the 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, was cause for some alarm to those who didn't know it was coming ā€” that is when it actually went out closer to 6:15 p.m. Thursday evening. As ABC 7 reports, San Francisco's Department of Emergency Management is calling the test a success, despite the delay, which has not been explained.

While some residents praised the effort to provide the city with a new alert system for major emergencies like earthquakes, others found the test, and its timing on the Loma Prieta anniversary, unsettling at best. Also, many were confused about where the test was coming from.

Because of the news about the new earthquake early-warning system that had been widely broadcast earlier in the day on Thursday, many people thought this test was an early warning of a coming quake.

And chatter on the internet in the last week about how Mexico City had a big earthquake in 2017 on the anniversary of another one 32 years earlier had anxieties running high.

The Department of Emergency Management says that future tests, and actual alerts, won't be delayed. The department's public information officer, Francis Zamora, tells ABC 7, "While this test was delayed, it was successful in the sense that we got a chance to understand what's going to work, what's going to cause us some problems during an actual emergency." He says the department is still investigating what happened to cause the delay, and should know within a few days.