911 calls over Facebook outage are becoming a thing. Friday, several people called 911, after discovering that FB was down and out of service. Californian authorities were forced to take to Twitter, to remind residents that 911 calls are only for emergencies, not for trivial matters, like not being able to view the latest Facebook posts from their friends.
Los Angeles residents made dozens of 911 calls on Friday, after discovering that Facebook had suffered an outage.
The popular social networking site was down on August 1st for a brief moment, but that was enough for numerous people to dial 911 and complain.
Some who called were asking for information on how to access the site, others wanted to know why Facebook was slow and few were brave enough to ask the dispatchers if they knew when FB would be back up.
A member of the Los Angeles Police Department, who was visibly annoyed and shocked by the volume of Facebook related calls, took to Twitter to ask residents to stop.
Sgt. Burton Brink, from the PIO CV Station, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sent out two tweets with the #Facebook hashtag, hoping to stop the flood of calls.
In the fist tweet, he reminded Los Angelenos that they are calling the police, not computer and laptop repair services at Best Buy.
#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
Upon the realization that his colleagues, were still be bothered with Facebook inquiries, Brink returned to Twitter and said:
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
Facebook’s outage, which was due to a technical failure took place between 12 p.m. ET and 2 p.m. ET for few people, but a majority of users could access the site after 30 minutes.
