Emergency Not: “911 Calls about Facebook Outage Angers L.A. County Sheriff’s Officials”

As many of you are know by know Facebook was offline for about 30 minutes yesterday. While most people were able to make it without the social network some people grew desperate and called 911 to ask when Facebook would be back online.
From The Los Angeles Times:

Officials at one Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department station were not happy after getting calls from residents because Facebook went down Friday morning.

#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

Here’s a bit more from Fortune:

“We get phone calls all the time, whether it be Facebook going down, people getting wrong orders at fast food restaurants, or their cable TV went out,” Sgt. Brink told Fortune. “But with Facebook in particular, we get calls probably because it’s such a widely-used thing.” Of his now-viral tweet, Sgt. Brink explains it was largely done to prevent more people from calling about the problem.

While this story is both humorous and sad teaching people that 911 is reserved for emergency use and not as an info center is serious. In the case of Facebook, Twitter is often the best place to find downtime info. (-:

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