911 calls “reporting” Facebook being down angers the L.A. County Sheriff’s Deparment.
Apparently, some Los Angeles residents deem social media site Facebook in such high regard that it being down is considered a cause to call the Country Sheriff’s Department and even 911 itself. And no, I’m not making this up. Early yesterday, Facebook went down, and while the service interruption was just a short while, that proved to be enough for some people to “report” this catastrophic event. It got so bad that Sgt. Burton Brink of the Crescenta Valley station had to tweet it out that it’s not the department’s concern saying, “#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don’t call us about it being down, we don’t know when FB will be back up!” In a following tweet, Sgt. Brink said that an unknown number of people even called 911 about the outage.
#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!— Sgt. Brink (@LASDBrink) August 1, 2014
Yes we got calls #facebookdown That is why I sent out my previous msg to prevent them. Unk number received on 911 or reg number TY #LASD— Sgt. Brink (@LASDBrink) August 1, 2014
Facebook released a statement regarding the site’s downtime stating, “Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We’ll update shortly.”
Thankfully, Facebook was up just a short while later. Can you imagine if this lasted the entire day or even a week? Let’s hope people calling 911 or even law enforcement for trivial matters such as these doesn’t happen again, since the time wasted in answering these concerns can and should be spent on actual emergencies.
Source: Twitter via L.A. Times
