  We show that the optical flare event discovered by Graham et al. (2020)
towards the active galactic nucleus J1249+3449 is fully consistent with being a
quasar microlensing event due to a $\simeq 0.1 M_{\odot}$ star, although other
explanations, such as that, mainly supported by Graham et al. (2020), of being
the electromagnetic counterpart associated to a binary black hole merger,
cannot be completely excluded at present.
