Facebook Outage Sparks 911 Calls, Angers Sheriff’s Officials
The recent Facebook outage led to an unfortunate revelation regarding the intelligence of some U.S. citizens, and it has left some L.A. County Sheriff’s officials fuming as a result.
When the popular social network went down on Friday morning, the first reaction from a number of people living in L.A. County was to place 911 calls complaining of the Facebook outage and inquiring as to when the service would once again be available.
This caused Sgt. Brink (Twitter tag: @LASDBrink) to hit the rival network with the following tweets:
#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
The initial message was favorited 1,598 times and retweeted 3,351 as of Saturday night. Additionally, there were a number of commenters deriding the intelligence of their fellow citizens (and rightfully so).
“In a world where people call the police because their drug dealer ripped them off, this is unsurprising,” wrote Twitter user Zane Henry. “Wow. People really didn’t call the police for that did they? Unbelievable,” said Scott Allen.
And another: “Please tell me people weren’t actually calling you guys?… hysterical and what a waste when there are real crimes 2 b reporting.”
Apparently, the lack of intelligence isn’t just confined to a one-time Facebook outage either. According to Brink:
@moneyries yes, we get calls all the time like this, cable TV, all sorts of things not working, they think we control.
— Sgt. Brink (@LASDBrink) August 1, 2014
While there is no way of knowing how many of the 911 calls were/are pranks, and how many were/are legitimate, we’ve certainly been around long enough to know that some people are fully capable of doing something this empty-headed.
Around this time last year, a man who lost power on a night when Breaking Bad came on decided to use the emergency number for his own gain.
From an August 2013 report by The Inquisitr:
A man in Connecticut was publicly outed by 911 services after he repeatedly called the emergency service because of a power outage.
The man was attempting to watch Breaking Bad when a power outage shut off his TV.
Apparently the man wasn’t happy about the outage, which hit much of Connecticut on Sunday night so he made the repeated calls.
Fairfield police received so many calls from the man that they posted on their Facebook page that an outage is “neither an emergency or a police related concern.”
Police, fed up with the man’s actions, threatened to arrest anyone who used the 911 system for anything other than life threatening reasons.
Do you think 911 calls for reasons like a Facebook outage or technology failure should be an arrest-able offense?
[Image via JaysonPhotography / Shutterstock.com]
