The BBC’s Today programme on Radio 4 went off air after an alarm told people to leave the building.
Monday morning’s was interrupted by an alarm which could be heard repeating: “Please leave the building immediately by the nearest exit.”
“You may be able to hear we have a little alarm going on here,” Nick Robinson told listeners as the alarm whirred in the background said.
The programme came back on air around 20 minutes later.
Robinson tweeted a picture of himself and Martha Kearney outside the studio with the caption: “Emergency over. If there was one … we’re now back in the studio.”
Just after 7.30am, the alarm started sounding in the studio. The presenters said they would try to carry on, before the alarm started whirring again.
“Well, maybe it is going to be quite hard to carry on with this kind of alam going on in the background,” Kearney said, adding she once had to leave the building during a show due to a fire.
The Today programme then moved to a report about T-shirts, while the live show went off air due to the alarm.
It had returned just before 8am.
It was not immediately clear what caused the alarm to sound.
“Despite that noise saying there was an emergency, as far as we can tell, there wasn’t,” Robinson told listeners as the show returned to normal.
The Independent has contacted the BBC.
