The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HIEMA) is receiving death threats following Saturday's false missile alert that panicked millions on the island, Hawaii News Now reported on Monday.

HIEMA's spokesman released a statement saying, "We understand that members of our community are angry about Saturday's false alarm, and we are looking at these messages as individuals blowing off steam. While we take any threat against our personnel seriously, we are doing our best not to escalate the situation."

The Federal Communications Commission is conducting an investigation into what went wrong, CBS News reported, with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai saying in a statement that Hawaii "did not have reasonable safeguards or process controls in place to prevent the transmission of a false alert."

Calling the mistake "absolutely unacceptable," he also stressed that "false alerts undermine public confidence in the alerting system and thus reduce their effectiveness during real emergencies."

The erroneous warning was sent during a shift change at HIEMA when a worker doing a routine test hit the live alert button, state officials said. That employee, who has been with agency for 10 years, was reassigned.

While many in Hawaii were upset at the panic caused by the mistake, Honolulu resident Lisa Foxen took a more optimistic view, saying that the best thing to come out of the scare was that it made her family come up with a plan if there is a real threat.

"I kind of was just almost like a deer in headlights," she said. "I knew what to do in a hurricane. I knew what to do in an earthquake. But the missile thing is new to me."