Facebook goes down, Los Angeles reports users called 911
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was forced to send out a Twitter message asking panicking citizens to stop calling 911 because Facebook was down. The widespread outage lasted just “a short time,” Facebook said, and full service was quickly restored.
Now the Captain issues a statement which is contradictory to the initial reports.
Capt. Britta Steinbrenner of the LA County Sheriff’s Information Bureau disputed Brink’s account and said her office was unaware of any such 911 Facebook calls. She said she had not been in contact with Brink and that he was not on duty at the time he tweeted about the calls related to the Facebook outage. She said the department is investigating and it was not immediately clear if Sgt. Brink violated department policy.
Sgt Burton Brink tweeted: ‘#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!’
The Guardian noted more details on Saturday about the second outage in two months.
“June’s outage was the longest for four years, with the site completely unaccessible for more than 31 minutes.=,” the article notes. “Whether or not this outage counts as longer depends on what time one counts it as starting at…If you can’t get on Facebook, why not kill time with happier memories, such as the time a fictionalised version of Mark Zuckerberg swore that Facebook would never crash, ‘ever’.”
A Facebook spokesman would not specify how many users were affected or elaborate on what caused the problem.
Facebook claims nearly 1.28 billion users across the world. It counts more than 80 percent of its users outside the U.S. and Canada.
