Police swarmed the headquarters of social networking giant Facebook, located at Menlo Park, California following a threat call that was made to authorities, reports the San Jose Mercury News . The area was cordoned off and all employees were huddled inside the campus resulting in a few anxious moments. The threat was quickly cleared after investigation by the police found the campus to be secure.
According to Menlo Park police Cmdr, Dave Bertini, the threat was called into the San Francisco Police Department at around 7 pm local time. The call was immediately transferred to officers stationed at Menlo Park who were asked to head to the Facebook Campus to assess the situation. “At this point, we’re not even sure the call was meant to be for the Menlo Park campus”, Bertini was quoted saying to the Mercury News .
Within minutes, the headquarters of Facebook was closed and the entrance was sealed with tape. A search was conducted in the office. Employees within the campus were asked to stay back until the operation was finished. They were only let go after the police disproved the existence of a threat of any kind by 8:30 pm, reports the Boston Herald . The San Francisco Police Department has not yet revealed what the exact nature of the threat was and brushed it aside to be of “non-credible” nature. No comments have come from Facebook authorities either.
Facebook, which famously operates out of the area had moved in to Menlo Park back in 2011, 7 years after the company was founded in 2004. The property used to be the old campus of Sun Microsystems and the area was called 1601 Willow Avenue before Facebook took over and changed the name of the area to “1 Hacker Way”. Facebook employs more than 6,000 people inside the campus and is also constructing a new housing complex for its employees nearby. It is unclear as to how many people were inside the Facebook headquarters when the threat call was made.
It is interesting to note that this threat came just a week after the Menlo Park city council voted in favor of Facebook’s proposal to station a full-time police officer near the new campus. The company had also pledged $200,000 to the city in return.
Facebook has been in the news lately for its famous acquisition of messaging client WhatsApp for over US $19 billion. The company is currently the biggest social media service on the planet boasting of more than 1.23 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2013 out of which 757 million are daily active users.
[Image Via: Emily Price/Mashable ]
