After a campus lockdown Wednesday night due to gunshots on Clark Beach, Northwestern students are criticizing the university for the over half-hour delay between the shots being fired and the first emergency notification from the university.

In a press conference, President Michael Schill expressed surprise at the criticism.

“What do you mean over half-hour delay? Sure, for email,” Schill said. “We know all the students are on the social media platforms these days. So we put our first emergency alert to YikYak just minutes after the shooting.”

After posting on YikYak, the university’s next step was making a TikTok account. The two-factor authentication and username selection took some time, Schill said, partially contributing to the delay. But, finally, the university was able to create a TikTok video with Subway Surfers on the bottom and a message on top read by the text-to-speech voice: “AlertNU: there is a campus-wide lockdown. Please shelter in place.”

Unfortunately, ten additional minutes passed before the TikTok went live, as administrators didn’t realize they had pressed “save to drafts” instead of “post.”

Only once all these steps had been accomplished did the university move to its traditional emergency alert system of emails, texts, and phone calls. “Gen Z doesn’t pick up phone calls from random numbers, so we didn’t spend nearly as much time on the phone message as our social media posts,” Schill said. “Student safety is our top priority.”