Facebook Outage Prompts 911 Calls

Claim:   A brief Facebook outage prompted social media users to call 911.

UNDETERMINED

Example:   [Collected via Facebook, August 2014]

Origins:   During the morning of 1 August 2014, service to Facebook was disrupted, rendering the social media network unreachable for some and painfully slow to operate for others. The company responded to the outage by issuing a statement saying "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." Service was restored about 30 minutes later.

However, even that short disruption supposedly proved too much for some Facebook users. Sgt. Burton Brink, the spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Crescenta Valley Station, tweeted that:

When challenged about his statement, Sgt. Brink tweeted:

Then he tweeted this about two hours later:

Brink's statements have been disputed by Capt. Britta Steinbrenner of the Sheriff’s Information Bureau, who said her office was unaware of any such calls. She also maintained she had not been in contact with Brink, that he was not on duty at the time he tweeted about the calls related to the Facebook outage, and that the department was investigating the situation.

While there exists some question about whether people contacted 911 about this particular Facebook outage,

citizens certainly have placed similar 911 calls about other non-emergency matters. During the summer of 2013, residents of a Connecticut town called 911 when a cable outage interrupted viewing of the popular television show Breaking Bad. In 2005, one irate consumer purportedly called 911 to report that her fast food burger hadn't been prepared to her liking and to demand that the police do something about it. The Los Angeles Police Department estimates that 70% of calls to 911 in the first half of 2014 have been non-emergency calls, including one from a man who called to complain that he hadn't gotten cheese on his hamburger.

Barbara "of which he said he camembert it" Mikkelson

Last updated:   7 August 2014

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