The deadly 7.7-magnitude earthquake that rattled Indonesia in August 2026 damaged hundreds of houses and buildings but a video of one building leaning precariously over a city street was not filmed following the tremor as social media posts claim. The video in fact shows a block badly damaged by a quake that struck eastern Taiwan in April 2024.
"Look... the condition of the buildings... following the 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia," says the Hindi-language caption of a Facebook video shared on August 15, 2026.
The video, filmed from street level, shows a building tilting dangerously to one side.
The same footage was also shared in similar Facebook and Instagram posts after a 7.7-magnitude tremor struck off Indonesia's Flores island on August 15 ( archived link).
According to the BNPB disaster mitigation agency, the earthquake killed at least 73 people, injured more than 900, and displaced nearly 60,000 people. The quake damaged almost 12,000 homes across several towns in Flores, where a BNPB spokesman said many residents were refusing to return home as hundreds of aftershocks rattled the island.
Indonesia frequently experiences earthquakes because it lies on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", a zone of intense seismic and volcanic activity that stretches from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific Ocean.
Flores was struck by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake in 1992, which triggered a tsunami and resulted in around 2,500 deaths.
Also among Indonesia's history of deadly quakes is a devastating 9.1-magnitude tremor in 2004 that struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed more than 220,000 throughout the region, including about 170,000 in Indonesia. The Boxing Day tragedy was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.
The video shared on social media, however, does not show the impact of the August 15 earthquake.
A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video found the same footage previously circulated two years earlier.
Australian broadcaster 10 News used the footage in a TikTok compilation shared on April 3, 2024 ( archived link). Text overlaid on the video reads, "Strongest earthquake in 25 years hits Taiwan".
The magnitude 7.4 quake that hit the island killed at least 17 people, injured more than 1,100 and damaged buildings and infrastructure near its epicentre in eastern Hualien city ( archived link).
The same clip was also posted on X on the same day, with its caption similarly linking it to the April 3, 2024 quake ( archived link).
The building in the falsely shared video matches one seen in June 2023 Google Street View imagery of Hualien's Xuanyuan Road ( archived link). The building was demolished following the earthquake.
Images of the titling building, taken from different angles, were also shared by Taiwanese media and AFP ( archived link).
AFP has previously debunked other posts misrepresenting the same clip as showing the impact of earthquakes outside Taiwan.