The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center lifted its tsunami alert for the Philippines, Palau and Indonesia on Friday, hours after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck off the southern Philippines.
"There is no longer a tsunami threat from this earthquake," the US agency said in an advisory.
The quake struck about 20 kilometres from Manay in the Mindanao region at 9.43am (11.43am AEDT), the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said.
Waves of up to three metres were forecast for threatened areas in the Philippines and up to a metre-high waves in Palau and Indonesia, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration earlier warned.
Children evacuated a school after a strong earthquake in Davao City in the Philippines on Friday. Source: AP / Manman Dejeto
"Our tumblers on the table were moving and falling," she said, adding power and communication lines have been cut, and the authorities are unable to assess the potential damage in some areas.
'Shaking was so strong'
Christine Sierte, a teacher in the town of Compostela near Manay, said she was in the middle of an online meeting when the violent shaking started.
"It was very slow at first, then it got stronger ... that's the longest time of my life. We weren't able to walk out of the building immediately because the shaking was so strong," she said.
"The ceilings of some offices fell, but luckily no one was injured."
Sierte said some of the school's nearly 1,000 students "suffered panic attacks and difficulty in breathing".
Around the same time as the Philippine quake, USGS reported a shallow 6.2-magnitude tremor just over 140km south-east of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.
A 99km-deep quake also struck near the Pacific island nation's second-largest city of Lae on Tuesday. No major damage was reported.
The latest Philippines quake struck just 11 days after a 6.9-magnitude quake killed 74 people and destroyed or damaged about 72,000 houses in the central island of Cebu.
Earthquakes are a near-daily occurrence in the Philippines, which is situated on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire', an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.
This is a developing story and this article will be updated.
