Melbourne Just Got Hit By an Actual Earthquake

Overview

It's the absolute last thing Melbourne needs right now, but just after 9am this morning, Wednesday, September 22, the city was hit by what's reported to be an earthquake. Yep — we're out here deep into Lockdown 6.0, having clocked up over 200 days of stay-at-home orders, and the universe goes and dials up the drama with the literal shifting of tectonic plates. Just who exactly Melbourne pissed off so badly, is yet to be revealed.

The experts over at the Seismology Centre shared details of the quake on Twitter, confirming a magnitude 5.3 earthquake hit Gippsland and was felt right across Melbourne, a good 100 kilometres away. The earth shakes lasted about 20 seconds, which proved pretty exciting stuff for this particular writer who hadn't even had their morning coffee yet. The preliminary magnitude 5.3 estimation is yet to be officially confirmed and may be revised.

As you can imagine, Twitter fired up instantly following the quake, as people rushed to swap notes on Melbourne's 843576th bad news event of the year. There'll be more information to come as the experts recover from this sneak environmental attack. But in the meantime, here are some winning reactions from the Twitterverse.

We'll bring you more information as details unfold on the earthquake event from this morning.