Yalies were awoken in the wee hours of the morning today with a series of emergency messages that Deputy University Secretary Martha Highsmith said were “inadvertent.”

At about 1 a.m., students received a pre-recorded phone call, text message and e-mail from Yale ALERT, the emergency communication system launched by the University in October 2007. Some students were confused by both the cryptic nature of the text message — it read “test dom /OptOut reply STOP 1701” — and the unorthodox hour of the test.

Then, at 9:40 a.m., Highsmith sent an e-mail to the Yale community apologizing for “the inconvenience, disruption of sleep, and creation of unnecessary concern” caused by the Yale ALERT test; she said the e-mail, text messages and phone calls were “the result of operator error in our system.”