Anyone ever had a fire alarm go off in their exam?

In my geography exam today the fire alarm went off, everyone went out of the hall for the one of the deputy heads to say that they had been told to ignore it. Don't know why the alarm would be set off knowing people were doing exams.

A fire doesn't know when people are doing exams

The fire alarm went off in my history exam on Monday. We had to sit in our seats for 30 minutes until it stopped ringing (despite it being a real fire!) and then finish our papers; we only had 3 minutes of the exam left! - what a waste of half an hour, especially when I had to take 3 different exams that day and I could have been revising for the later papers during that time.

thats not fair? shouldn't they pause the timer during that? not only is it distracting but more importantly you had a whole 30 minutes taken off?

Sorry, I didn't quite make it clear - the timer was paused but we only had 3 minutes of the exam remaining when the fire bell went off, so we had to wait 30 minutes for the fire bell to stop ringing just to do the last 3 minutes (which nobody did anything in anyway as listening to a fire bell for half an hour had completely distracted everyone). The bigger impact was upon my psychology and additional maths exams that afternoon (one of which was scheduled early anyway so as to fit two exams in one session) as I had very little time to prepare thanks to the morning history exam finishing 30 minutes later than I had anticipated.